Well, this distinction is officially acknowledged sometimes, fortunately. Among the opponents of the communist regime, the internationally famous intellectuals suffered far less consequences than a simple provincial teacher or a some worker in some factory. They risked everything. There is pathos in such a risk: while facing it you had little chance to get any result, retaliation was coming your way. Few stories of this type surfaced and they are justly regarded as martyrs. Probably most of them vanished quietly—and we cannot represent the disproportion, we cannot imagine it (yes, we don’t have an image for it).
Although it lacks decency, I should point out that there is evolutionary value in such behavior. Their stories are immensely emotional, they are real heroes. But then we have a really complicated context to define real and heroes...
Unfortunately there are cultures where interpersonal relationships are more personalized than in others: where people (generally) understand any criticism as targeting the self (that mysterious whole) and not the idea/point.
Work meetings are one way rhetoric in such parts, famously boring and result in as much creativity as the authority has. Usually less civilized places posses a weaker level of abstraction. (When everything is urgent, nothing is hypothetical.)
So it isn’t only a question of sub-optimal methods chosen by various individuals—be they politicians—to make a friendlier world, but of big groups, entire mentality groups, for which the very term “dialogue” has other boundaries. So the play-safe, good-for-all economical solution is to forbid criticism or to use extreme relativism for everything. The “holistic” conversation.
We all do it sometimes, out of interest or ignorance.