The critical incident approach is a performance evaluation strategy that entails gathering and evaluating particular instances of an employee's conduct that demonstrate job performance. This method focuses on individual occurrences that demonstrate unusually outstanding or poor performance, rather than general perceptions of the employee's work.
Example
An HR manager may use the critical incident approach to assess the performance of a sales representative by gathering particular instances of successful or unsuccessful sales contacts with clients. These examples may then be utilized to offer feedback to the employee while also guiding future training and development.
