Compare methods

	Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales	Critical Incident Technique
Field	Organizational Behavior	Organizational Behavior
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1963	1954
Originator	Patricia Cain Smith & L. M. Kendall	John C. Flanagan
Type	Behaviorally anchored performance-rating scale construction	Qualitative behavior-elicitation and classification procedure
Seminal source	Smith, P. C., & Kendall, L. M. (1963). Retranslation of expectations: An approach to the construction of unambiguous anchors for rating scales. Journal of Applied Psychology, 47(2), 149-155.	Flanagan, J. C. (1954). The critical incident technique. Psychological Bulletin, 51(4), 327-358.
Aliases	BARS, Behavioral Expectation Scales, Smith-Kendall Scales, Behaviorally Anchored Scales	CIT, Flanagan Critical Incident Technique, Critical Incidents Method, Critical Incident Analysis
Related	3	3
Summary	Behaviorally anchored rating scales (BARS) are performance-appraisal instruments whose scale points are defined by concrete examples of job behavior rather than by vague adjectives like 'good' or 'excellent.' Patricia Cain Smith and L. M. Kendall introduced the method in 1963 with their technique of retranslation of expectations, a procedure for constructing unambiguous behavioral anchors. The core problem they tackled is that ordinary rating scales leave raters to guess what each numerical point means, so that one supervisor's 4 is another's 2, fatally undermining reliability and fairness. BARS solves this by attaching specific behavioral descriptions, drawn from critical incidents and vetted by independent expert judges, to each level of each performance dimension. The construction process is deliberately participatory and quantitative, which both improves measurement and builds rater understanding. BARS became one of the most influential and widely studied formats in performance appraisal.	The critical incident technique (CIT) is a qualitative procedure for studying human behavior by collecting and classifying detailed accounts of specific incidents in which behavior was especially effective or ineffective in achieving an aim. John Flanagan introduced it in his landmark 1954 Psychological Bulletin article, drawing on his work selecting and classifying aircrew in World War II, where vague trait descriptions had proved useless and concrete behavioral accounts proved decisive. Rather than asking people for opinions or generalities, CIT asks observers to recount what actually happened, what the person did, and why it mattered, then builds a framework of behavioral requirements inductively from those accounts. The technique gave applied psychology a rigorous, replicable way to derive job requirements, performance criteria, and training content from real behavior. It remains a foundational method underlying job analysis, behaviorally anchored rating scales, and competency modeling. Its hallmark is grounding abstract requirements in observable, situated action.