Having been on both sides as well, the influence is present whether people acknowledge it or not, and if you're failing to account for it as a manager, you're s

Having been on both sides as well, the influence is present whether people acknowledge it or not, and if you're failing to account for it as a manager, you're setting yourself up for failure. Modern company structures simply do not allow for honest feedback. The employee's livelihood is tied to the manager's satisfaction with him, and it's pretty likely that the employee's chances for advancement and increased compensation are too. As long as that's the case, almost all people are going to be in self-preservation mode whenever they're operating in range of that manager. If you want honest feedback, you have to make the person independent to the degree which you want them to be honest. An employee's honesty ratio is a sliding scale inversely linked to their dependence on and/or interest in your goodwill. To get to 100% honesty, they have to be willing to "burn their bridges" with you; that's when people say what they're really thinking. The exceptions to this are people who are too young and/or naive to anticipate the normal reaction to honest feedback, and thus don't quite have their honesty:dependence:goodwill ratio in equilibrium yet. I once had a manager convince me that he just wanted everyone to be open, honest, and straightforward. I'm sure I was a good intel source for him as probably the only person there that would just tell him what I was thinking, but it was ridiculously naive of me to believe that stuff, and I didn't last a year at that company. I learned well there that no matter what people say, it's extremely likely that they're going to fall back to the basic situational incentives. In isolated, rare incidents of political heroism this may not happen, but it should never be depended upon, and it certainly should never be assumed to be the basis of an elongated supervisory relationship.