They need management/skilled workers to stay so they offer bonuses contingent on them staying on-board for some specified amount of time. You need people who know how to offload remaining inventory and other assets to clear the books. According to the article, this money is meant to be divided between ~300 corporate employees.

Imagine the company is closing stores in a month and all the executives and management stop going to work tomorrow. Who is closing the stores? Who is handling exiting the staff properly? You don't want police coming and putting chains around your store and staff just having nothing but chaos for a month. You'll end up people not showing up to work. The stores might be open or not. You might end up with looting.

You want an orderly exit, and they're incentivizing the management to help achieve this.

Investors and employees could attempt to sue individual executives for mismanagement of a business, but if you want the government to punish business executives for failing at business you're in the wrong economic system.

$25M is chump change at the scale of Sears, with 89,000 employees. It's only $280 per employee which is not nearly enough money to keep everyone working.

unfortunately most staff are incentivized enough by a continued salary. the managers could just flee and the lowly laborers would have no idea how to do what needs to be done.