The "fear" in FearCulture--the fear that although you do your job professionally and to the best of your ability (assuming here that you are competent to the task, or even excellent)--something will go wrong, and you will be assigned blame and punished (with termination as the most severe consequence).

This doesn't refer to termination for "legitimate" reasons--misconduct, repeated and demonstrated inablity to do the work, layoff, or even political issues.  This refers to termination for something not going right in an organization where FailureIsUnacceptable.

Going to work in constant FearOfBeingFired is enjoyable for nobody.

A sure indicator of an AntiPattern.  In a well-run organization; making an honest mistake (assuming appropriate professional practice and discipline was observed) shouldn't get you canned, especially in those professions where results are not deterministic.
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The only "legitimate" reasons for termination are a) misconduct, b) inability to (or unwillingness to) do the work, or c) layoff, where it is true that both 1) the company no longer had need of as many employees with the same job description as you and 2) your name was drawn out of a hat quite at random. In particular, being laid off non-randomly and any termination for political reasons I would consider to be ILlegitimate on its face. Failing to win a popularity contest is not a valid cause. Of course, there's a few seeming exceptions -- a cocktail waitress has to remain physically attractive, a customer-facing employee can't be offensive to the customers in their outspoken political beliefs expressed while on duty, a person who nobody has confidence in due to possible ties to the mob can't be in the public service, etc. -- but in this case the "political" problem or whatever actually impacts their *ability to do the job* in some way, rather than being irrelevant to it. So they may be terminated for *inability to do the job* even though they can't be for political reasons per se.

But then maybe that's why "legitimate" was in quotation marks above...
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CategoryEmployment