This seems cyclical to me. If you do the bare minimum and get fired, that is a contradiction.
If the bare minimum is getting promoted then that means there is no room to slack.
If you look like you are slacking to your coworkers, then you probably are not doing the bare minimum. The bare minimum would be exactly what it takes to keep your job.
So I believe what you are saying is that there are multiple bare minimums from various perspectives. In those cases, you take the biggest one.
Another example for a gameable aspect of promotion is cutting up your achievements to look more favorable during a promo round e.g., salami slicing. If you hit a promotion, save the extra stuff for the next round.
And if you are at a large organization, you certainly have the data to estimate exactly the bars for promotion.
The key delta is often that the bare minimum to keep your coworkers from being demotivated by you is a bit higher than the bare minimum to keep your manager from noticing your underperformance.
If the work you are doing falls in this middle range, then your slacking will harm those around you but you probably won't get fired (if it takes longer for a manager to get fed up than the mean time between reorgs, you probably can survive indefinitely)
If the game was fixed and everyone had full information, there isn’t a reason this would happen.
But I agree if the promotion/firing is relative or dynamic in some way, then you’d race down to arbitrarily low effort.
The real problem is correlating work with value in an unbiased way. If you had perfect information on the value of each worker, I can’t see how it would be complicated to do a cost/benefit analysis.
But without reading/predicting the future you can’t usually figure out value because an unfinished product has no current value and a finished/legacy product has fixed value. In either case the worker has no marginal value.
If the bare minimum is getting promoted then that means there is no room to slack.
If you look like you are slacking to your coworkers, then you probably are not doing the bare minimum. The bare minimum would be exactly what it takes to keep your job.
So I believe what you are saying is that there are multiple bare minimums from various perspectives. In those cases, you take the biggest one.
Another example for a gameable aspect of promotion is cutting up your achievements to look more favorable during a promo round e.g., salami slicing. If you hit a promotion, save the extra stuff for the next round.
And if you are at a large organization, you certainly have the data to estimate exactly the bars for promotion.