Of course other employees should aim angst about unfairness at management. But they won't. Not entirely. And that overflow can be enough to nudge relationships from friendly to strained/tense-professional, or not-particularly-friendly-but-professional relationships straight into unproductive-leaning-towards-toxic territory.

I was in a group of developers who had the hat method essentially performed for them [1]. Relationships changed [2]. Even after the discrepancies were largely corrected, the relationships remained strained.

[1] The short version goes: the comptroller's office was compiling stats on salary ranges for comparison to regional averages (back during the bubble, when management was paranoid about being behind the curve on pay and losing talent). Someone either needed help with a formula from, or just directly leaked the data to, a developer friend. That developer, upon seeing the wide variance, shared with the group.

And let's just say it was surprisingly trivial to map the outlying data points to names.

[2] Which is why I'd recommend the calculated average method over the hat method. It's better to see your position relative to the group, than to see the raw data that can impact interpersonal relationships.