Question

Explain in your own words how you would go about developing a behaviorally anchored rating scale

Answer 1

Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scale (BARS) developed by Smith and Kendall are used to rate employee performance. In this method focus is on the behaviors which are important for completing a job task rather than general characteristics of employees.

It compares individual performance against particular behavior which is attached to numerical rating. These behavioral points are collected using critical incident technique. Critical incident technique is a procedure to identify human behaviors which is significant for a particular job. For critical incidents supervisors and job holders are probed to identify specific examples of effective and ineffective behavior related to job performance. After that these behaviors are grouped in different dimension and each of the dimensions is defined. Different jobholders and supervisors recheck these groupings. Finally, 7-8 of these dimensions are chosen as a behavior anchor.

Example of BARS for a scheduling team whose key task is to source projects from the front end and assigning it to different resources in a backend team. Below mentioned is a checklist method where different behaviors are identifies for the job and an employee is rated with respect to his performance against each behavior

1. Proactively approaches the front end team to receive projects                        

2. Takes client call to understand the project requirement, budget and deadline  

3. Vigorously look for the resources that have downtime and assign project to them

4. Clearly communicate the deadline and budget to the resources

5. Fill in the tracker and update the front end team on the project status

6. Keep track on employees leave status

The employee will be rated on his or her ability to meet each expectation of job. If an employee receives 7 points against each of the behavioral criterion then he will be rated extremely good in his performance appraisal. The rating scale will go from 7 to 1 where 7 being the highest denote extremely good and 1 being the lowest denotes extremely poor. Other criterions will be good for 6 points, above average for 5 points, average for 4 points, below average for 3 points and poor for 2 points.