At least not in the article.
Are those to be rewarded those who blundered, or are they more recent hires or uninvolved?
Are they best equipped to manage the chapter 11 bankruptcy because they know what needs to be done--and replacing them would require a month or two to bring new hires, if they could be found, up to speed and during this time they'd be making crucial, make-or-break decisions?
Broad brush painting can kill a company. Managers are individuals and should be viewed as individuals. I don't like being treated as "just another employee" that's identical and hot-swappable with anybody else. It shows blatant disrespect. It's a pain to stop and think of people as people, but it's a good habit. Both on the part of managers and empoyers as well as on the part of stockholders, board members, and sideline observers.
I say this because I was involved in an organization a recession or two ago that was hitting a really rough patch. Some parts of it were in good shape. Some managers had made horrible, horrible decisions and were dragging the entire organization into receivership. In one or two cases, the top management had replaced a bad manager or two with decent people, although the top guy was the biggest part of the disaster. And in a case or two the "bad manager's" problem was that he wasn't a genius, able to predict what the economy and technology would be doing in a couple of years' time and get his supervisor to agree to changes. His decisions were often sound at the time, but either he wasn't prescient or he was blocked.
The org went into a kind of receivership as we disposed of the "CEO" and hired a temp CEO. We paid hefty bonuses to some managers to keep them. They knew how things ran and had done a good job for years, or were fairly recent hires and showed promise. Replacing them would have cost a pretty penny in the best of times, and trying to recruit a competent senior manager for an organization that was officially on life-support was impossible. Moreover, they'd be punished for other people's faults. The clear choice was to pay the bonuses to retain what talent we had or have them jump ship as we got green, unproven or proven-to-be-bad "talent" that would help sink us. If that happened--and who could blame competent staff leaving a sinking company--the people who were competent and loyal would be punished even more, with no bonuses *and* with unemployment.
The bonus program had another bonus for us, too. When bonuses were secretly paid almost as soon as the board approved their bonuses, before the new CEO was officially hired, not all the managers got bonuses. Those who didn't get bonuses knew to jump ship (since the managers shared the information the Board kept secret), they knew they simply weren't wanted. It meant that the new guy didn't come on board and immediately have to fire the supervisors and coworkers of decent staff. Of course, we coordinated non-payment of bonuses with the new guy.
We had no court supervision. But the idea of a chapter 11 company necessarily telling "it's management" that it's done a bad job is like having a company where one shop screws up telling its entire workforce that it's done a bad job, or blaming an entire department because one project or engineer or salesman bombed.
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