Critical incident technique

In this method, the manager prepares lists of statements of every effective & ineffective behaviour of worker. These crucial incidents or events represent the dazzling or poor behaviour of worker on the job. The manager maintains logs on each worker, whereby periodically he records crucial incidents of the workers' behaviour. At the ending of the rating period, these recorded crucial incidents are utilized in the evaluation of the workers' performance. An instance of a good critical incident of a sales assistant is the following:

July 20 - The sales clerk patiently attended to the customer's complaint. He is, prompt, polite, enthusiastic in solving the customer's difficulty.

Alternatively, the bad critical incident may appear as under:

July 20 - The sales assistant stayed for 45 minutes over on his break throughout the busiest part of the day. He does not succeed to answer the store manager's call thrice. He is idle, , stubborn , negligent and uninterested in work.

This particular method provides an objective basis for conducting a systematic discussion of an employee's performance. This method ignores recently bias (most current incidents get too much emphasis). However this method suffers from the following restrictions:

1.   Negative incidents can be more noticeable rather than positive incidents.
2.   The supervisors have a tendency to drop off a series of complaints regarding incidents throughout an annual performance review session.
3.   It results in very strong supervision which may not be liked by the worker.
4.   The recording of incidents might be a chore for the manager concerned, who can be too busy or forget to complete it.

Most often, the critical incidents method is applied to assess the performance of superiors.