Steven Bainbridge, in the course of congratulating Steven Taylor on his promotion, makes the following observation:

When I was up for tenure (a nerve-wracking time, even worse than sweating out the bar exam), a senior colleague told me that getting tenure didn’t change anything in your life except that you stopped thinking about tenure. I didn’t believe him, but it turned out to be true. If you’re internalized the norms of teaching and scholarship, you don’t change what you do. You just keep teaching and writing.

This seems like an odd analysis; the grant of tenure* doesn’t remove the incentive to publish, teach, and perform service at a high level (in the various department and college-prescribed ratios); while it is true you can no longer be fired for failing to do those things as proficiently, most associate-level professors at least aspire to promotion to full professor and the prestige and monetary rewards associated with that rank, which requires a similar level of effort (as between assistant and associate) to attain. Thus, we would rationally expect that professors would be more likely to slack off after promotion to full professor, rather than after achieving tenure.