If you ignore [B players] long enough, they begin to see themselves as low performers
By day, managers run themselves ragged worrying about their A players: their stars, their rainmakers, their top 15 percent. By night, the same managers fret over their C players—their bottom 15 percent of staff. The C players are those employees, incompetent by accident or design, who drift along and yet pose a drag on the organization because they require constant reinforcement.
This article was provided with permission from Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.