Amcor reviews

In R&D, there is no much room for promotion. As a company, the efficiency is no high.

Honesty is not always the best policy when reviewing your manager for the simple reason that honesty only works in an environment of trust. The person reviewing your review will probably be an upper level manager or Director of some kind. Chain of command dictates that you probably don't work very closely with this person so you don't know what kind of person this is or what their true motives are. Does this upper level manager inherently trust you? They probably know very little of you as well. Secondly, will this manager see the review? They are usually not dumb and even if it is anonymous they are usually able to pretty accurately determine which of his subordinates wrote it, either by hidden clues or examples or by something as simple as writing style and various turns of phrase. Finally, what is the political situation of management at this company? This is very important because often you have to consider that a bad middle manager with long tenure sticks around usually for political reasons. If it is so widely know that this manager is awful then why else would they still be around? Perhaps they are poker buddies with an upper level manager or Director and your "honest" review winds up on his best friends lap? So ultimately, what do you gain by being honest about your manager? It is clear what you risk but what do you really gain? Your organization sounds averse to clearing out ineffective (by your definition) middle management and they are certainly already aware of his/hers weak soft skills. What is one more negative review going to do for anything to really change? Do you honestly believe they will try to remedy the situation? Very likely not. This is just one of many problems of being honest in any peer reviewed performance reviews, especially when subordinates are to review managers. As Joel Spolsky They do nothing but provide inaccurate performance metrics to management and they kill morale. If management actually decided to pay attention to their employees performance throughout the year and would sit down and talk with employees in frank and clear terms then they would get better feedback and everybody would do better overall. So no, it is not in your best interest to be honest, but at the same time you do not want to outright lie either. Just tell them select pieces of the truth that are neither flattering nor condemning.