Any attempt at anything short of wildly positive feedback will be met with extremely aggressive reactions, because of the reaction from the organisation that will follow.
Yes. The cult of optimism and positive thinking[1], because like someone else on this post implied, the way you think about things changes physical reality.
At best it changes your perception which can be in your best interest or not.
People don't talk about this issue anywhere near enough. You can't just do internally ordered evaluations, because someone will eventually compare them to something else and harm everyone who got a harsh 'scale'.
Hence the inability of lone professors or colleges to fight grade inflation; if your students are competing with inflated GPAs from another school (or an expectation that all GPAs are inflated), the incentive is entirely against you.
I suppose this would be the upside of stack-rank if you did it right; a purely relative ranking system can't get poorly translated between groups. But of course, that also means it can't be used to properly distribute benefits between them.
It's a strawman because nobody is suggesting that feedback should only be "wildly positive". Positive reinforcement is very different from being wildly positive.
It's also a slippery slope fallacy because there is no evidence that there will be extremely aggressive reaction to constructive criticism.
If you could provide evidence that managers who use positive reinforcement have underperforming teams this would be an interesting comment. I suspect that would be hard to find.
Any attempt at anything short of wildly positive feedback will be met with extremely aggressive reactions, because of the reaction from the organisation that will follow.
Plenty of managers do that today of course.