Comment by dghlsakjg

The example was a birthday card, but the mechanism is more important: the manager disregarded a policy in a way that was disrespectful to a specific employee.

People don’t care about the birthday card. They care when the manager does something nice for everyone but them.

Nobody cares about a pizza party, they care that the manager didn’t think to save any pizza for the team that had to do an emergency call out to a client site during lunch.