Human societies develop pecking orders - the process of sorting out who will dominate or influence whom and in what way can be messy and unpredictable. Most organisations start with founders leaders who have preconceptions about how things should be run and therefore impose rules that initially determine how authority should be obtained and how aggressive behaviour is to be managed.

Sociologists have shown that manners and tact are not mere niceties of social life but essential rules for how to keep us from destroying each other socially. 

The most fundamental rule in all societies is that we must uphold each other's claims because our self-esteem is based on it. Human society of any sort hinges on the cultural agreements to try to uphold each other's identities and illusions, even if it means lying.

One reason why performance appraisal in organisations is emotionally resisted so strongly is that mangers know full well they are violating the larger cultural rules and norms when they sit a subordinate down to give him or her feedback. To put it bluntly, when we tell people what we really think of them in an aggressive way this can be functionally equivalent to social murder. Someone who goes around doing this is viewed as unsafe to have around, and if he behavior persists, we often declare such a person mentally ill and lock them up. IN his analysis of mental hospitals, Goffman showed brilliantly how "therapy" was in many cases teaching the patients the rules of polite society so that they could be let free to function in that society without making others too anxious. IN more traditional societies, the jester or the fool played the role of telling the truth about what was going on, and this worked only because the role could be publicly discounted and ignored.