Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scale: Examples + Guide
Struggling to make performance reviews fair, useful, and consistent? A behaviorally anchored rating scale might help you cut through the subjectivity and focus on what actually matters—how people show up and do the work.
Behaviorally anchored rating scales (BARS) have been around for nearly 60 years—and they’re still in use for a reason. When performance is assessed based on specific, observable behaviors, it’s much easier to stand by those decisions. That kind of clarity makes BARS a solid option for many organizations. But how does this method fit into modern talent management, and what does it take to build one?
Contents
What is a behaviorally anchored rating scale?
Behaviorally anchored rating scale examples
Uses of BARS throughout the employee life cycle
Behaviorally anchored rating scale advantages and disadvantages
How to develop a behaviorally anchored rating scale
What is a behaviorally anchored rating scale?
A behaviorally anchored rating scale (BARS) is a performance evaluation tool that assesses employees across specific dimensions by matching their behavior to clearly defined examples tied to each level of a rating scale—typically using five, seven, or nine points.
You can define those behaviors using the critical incident technique (CIT) or other job analysis methods. Subject matter experts identify a range of outcomes and then describe specific incidents and the behaviors that create those outcomes.
A similar tool is the behavioral observation scale (BOS) used to measure specific expected behavior frequency.
Behaviorally anchored rating scale examples
A BARS works by defining what specific behaviors look like at different performance levels. Here are a few sample dimensions with associated rating criteria:
1. Teamwork
This dimension focuses on how well an employee collaborates and communicates with others. On a five-point scale:
1
Makes inappropriate or rude comments; shows dismissive or uncooperative behavior.
2
Participates in team activities but often interrupts or disregards input from others.
3
Cooperates with others and communicates respectfully; contributes to group tasks.
4
Actively supports team members and listens to different perspectives.
5
Encourages open communication, helps resolve conflicts, and fosters a positive team dynamic.
2. Technical skill – Knowledge of Python
This applies to a software engineer’s ability to work with Python. On a five-point scale:
1
Lacks working knowledge of Python; unable to complete tasks without significant help.
2
Understands basic syntax and concepts; completes tasks with supervision.
3
Can write functional Python code and troubleshoot common issues with minimal guidance.
4
Independently completes Python-based projects, including integrating related tools or libraries.
5
Develops efficient, scalable solutions in Python and mentors others in best practices.
3. Initiative
A BARS measures how often and effectively an employee takes proactive steps at work.
1
Avoids responsibility beyond assigned tasks; waits for direction even when action is clearly needed.
2
Completes assigned work but doesn’t take steps beyond the basics; hesitant to act without guidance.
3
Occasionally takes initiative on familiar tasks or when prompted.
4
Frequently identifies opportunities for improvement and acts without needing direction.
5
Consistently takes proactive steps, anticipates needs, and initiates meaningful changes or improvements.
Uses of BARS throughout the employee life cycle
Most organizations use behavioral anchors because they help connect each role to the company’s goals. They offer a clear picture of what’s expected in a role, which makes them useful across the entire employee life cycle—from hiring and onboarding to development and performance reviews.
You can use a behaviorally anchored rating scale in the following HR activities:
- Talent acquisition: When recruiters understand the specific behaviors needed for a role, they can source more effectively. Hiring managers then use BARS to conduct and evaluate structured interviews.
- Learning and development: BARS make it easier to pinpoint specific skills or behaviors an employee needs to develop. That information can be used to build tailored learning paths in your LMS, so training is targeted rather than one-size-fits-all.
- Performance management: Behavioral anchors make it easier for managers to give focused feedback, assess performance fairly, and make informed decisions about promotions and raises.
- Career pathing: Clear expectations tied to behaviors help employees see what growth looks like, making it easier to plan development and keep top performers engaged.
- Succession management: Identifying talent gaps is easier to do when you have specific performance dimensions to identify high potential employees (Hi-Pos) and select potential successors.
- Culture: Nurturing behaviors that drive your culture can have a significant impact on your organization. Anchors also provide behaviors for leaders to model.
Other rating scales for employee evaluation
The most commonly used scale is the five-level graphic rating scale. It is a value of 1 to 5, with a brief label for each level. In the past, typical labels were “satisfactory,” “average”, “excellent”, “superior”, and “unacceptable”. Many organizations have tried to make labels more encouraging, but they still result in subjective judgment and rater biases.
Companies often apply graphic rating scales to competency-based evaluations. However, these might provide generalized descriptions, encouraging subjectivity in ratings.
Other scales exist, ranging from three performance levels to 10 or more. About 15 years ago, an engineering company insisted on a point rating scale from 0.01 to 10.00 with two decimals. Their justification was that their engineers enjoyed the “illusion of precision”.
Jack Welch, a former CEO of US company GE, created stacked ranking, also known as forced ranking or “rank and yank” in the 1980s. Welch used the ranking to group people as A, B, and C players. The A group was deemed promotable, and the C group was dismissed. The stacked ranking method was popular but died out after employee backlash. Some companies used it to justify layoffs during the 2008 recession. Although it rewarded top performers, it almost always led to destructive competition among employees.
Performance evaluation methods like BARS are just one piece of the talent management puzzle. To build a future-focused approach that truly supports your organization’s growth, you need the skills to connect performance with broader business goals.
AIHR’s Talent Management Certificate Program equips you to design systems that drive long-term talent development, succession planning, and workforce readiness—laying the foundation for a stronger, more resilient organization.
BARS: Advantages and disadvantages
Most industry-leading companies have implemented continuous feedback, but many still rely on annual reviews to help make decisions about raises and promotions. They also need a consistent framework for strength-based coaching throughout the year and summarizing performance during reviews. A BARS works well for both purposes and can be used alongside other feedback tools.
Advantages of BARS
- Validity: Jobholders and their supervisors who know the job develop the behavior descriptions. Their expertise creates construct validity, which means BARS measures what they’re intended to measure. For example, if you evaluate whether a customer-facing employee treats visitors well, you can specify that the expected performance is greeting them with a smile. The evaluation matches the operational definition. Their content validity means they represent actual behaviors of good customer service.
- Easy to use: Because behaviors are well-defined, managers and their employees understand them without extensive explanations or training. As a result, managers don’t have to spend hours writing long narratives to justify ratings. Behaviors are either present or absent.
- Clear standards: A BARS creates mutual understanding between managers and their employees on what they are reviewing, and opportunities for improvement. This understanding then facilitates a developmental discussion.
- Consistent: Because behavioral statements are simple and straightforward, there is little variance regardless of the assessed party and the assessor.
- Individualized: There are commonalities among roles across the organization, but each position in the organization will have a unique set of role-related behaviors.
- Impartial: The focus is on behavior, not the value of the person being evaluated, which enables frank, open, and objective discussions.
Disadvantages of BARS
- Complex implementation: Although many roles have similar soft skills, citizenship, and leadership behaviors, every role has different behavioral indicators that require analysis. You must develop, review, and calibrate every performance level for each behavior. A BARS is easier to maintain in businesses like retail, insurance, or contact centers with many similar roles.
- Expensive: Developing a BARS requires job analysis and advanced skills to review behavioral statements written by subject matter experts. You may need an industrial psychologist or consulting company’s services. Experienced workers, supervisors, and HR staff must take time away from their jobs to write down the behaviors.
- Time-consuming: Managers may find it a burden (especially in businesses with multiple similar roles) to discuss the performance of 60 or more behaviors with each individual. Additionally, in industries like contact centers, first-level managers often have a span of control of up to 30 workers.
- Frequent updates: In today’s workforce, where skills have a short half-life, you must update behaviors frequently. In some cases, roles can change with every job posting.
- Leniency bias: A BARS removes or reduces many bias errors, but it doesn’t eliminate leniency errors. The assessor must focus on each behavior in the review rather than giving overly generous ratings based on personal feelings, assumptions, or a desire to avoid tough conversations.
How to develop a behaviorally anchored rating scale
Even the best performance management system won’t be successful unless you prepare your organization for the change. We recommend you begin your project a year and a half to two years before the first evaluations are due. Here’s why:
- Most initiatives fail because of a lack of commitment from top management. Another is a failure to manage the change. To avoid this, prepare the executive team to lead. The first communication should come from the CEO, who should be completely transparent about the program’s purpose and goals. If you don’t get that engagement, the prevailing sentiment could be, “Oh, no. Here comes HR—again.”
- Employees need to know their performance criteria before the evaluation period begins.
- It could take several months to develop the performance dimensions and behaviors, depending on SMEs’ availability.
- If you move from conducting only periodic reviews to providing continuous, strength-based feedback, launch it using behavioral anchors to facilitate frequent conversations and prepare for the annual summary review.
- You may need to upskill your managers in performance conversations.
Here’s what a typical process for building a behaviorally anchored rating scale could look like at your organization:
1. Build a governance team
If you make your project an HR effort instead of an organizational transformation, you miss a chance to align HR with the business and lead a lasting change. Focus your efforts on aligning people with the organization’s purpose and profitability, as people want to be on a winning team.
Reach out to leaders in your organization who understand your commitment to the business’ success. Look to people who create value for your company.
If you don’t have one already, let your team become the steering committee for performance governance. If you have one, they are your team. You gain insight by looking at performance through the eyes of those who make value happen.
Include Marketing on your team. Marketers know best how to engage their audience. Marketing today is about relationships, and marketers who’ve spent years learning how to connect with people about what matters to them can help you connect with your organization’s employees and improve your internal communication.
2. Assemble and prepare your teams of experts
Get commitments from subject matter experts to serve on your teams. Consider using teams of experts in each job group facilitated by HR classification experts. Your SMEs could be hiring managers for the roles you’re developing BARS for, or senior employees in those roles.
You will have two groups of SMEs—the first will create the behavior statements and the second will retranslate the statements into performance categories and their definitions.
Have your HR expert, I/O psychologist, or consulting partner prepare them for writing behavior statements. You may also want to coach them on consensus decision-making.
You can take an inductive approach to grouping performance dimensions using commonalities among critical incidents/behaviors, or a deductive approach where you specify domains and your SMEs develop behavioral statements within them.
We will describe the inductive approach in the following steps.
3. Identify behaviors
Have your teams use Critical Incident Technique, Task Inventories or a combination of them to explore behaviors related to the job, both effective and ineffective behaviors. You can use our job analysis guide and template to work through the process.
Edit the statements into a standard format and remove redundancies, then identify commonalities to prepare for creating performance dimensions.
Here’s the simplified summary of the process of creating a BARS:
4. Establish performance dimensions
Group behaviors to create performance dimensions. For instance, performance dimensions for a supply chain manager might include “Communications and Negotiations with Suppliers” and “Optimizing Warehouse Functions.”
5. Retranslate the behaviors
Your second group of SMEs will then align each critical incident or behavior to the performance dimensions it best fits.
6. Scale behaviors and incidents
Sort your behaviors into your rating scale based on SMEs’ evaluation of their effectiveness.
You will probably find that you don’t have a statement for every performance level on your scale, so your team will need to fill in the blanks.Scale Label Behavior 1 Behavior 2 Behavior 3 Behavior 4 5 Exemplifies Standards ✔️ 4 Exceeds Standards ✔️ 3 Meets Standards ✔️ 2 Needs Improvement ✔️ 1 Does Not Meet Standards
7. Retain relevant behaviors
Determine which behaviors are relevant by choosing those with low deviation related to the effectiveness of each behavior. If you do not have relevant performance data, you need to rely on SMEs’ judgment. Look for each statement’s construct validity relative to the performance scale.
8. Develop the final version
Edit the surviving statements for grammar, syntax, and clarity, taking care to preserve their meaning.
For instance, the original statement in one of the performance dimensions for a nurse might state: “Shows higher levels of empathy in all dealings with patients and their families.”
You also want to show what “higher level” means. For example, you could write: “Conveys higher levels of empathy with patients and their families by mirroring their posture and tone of voice.”
For a customer service representative, this statement could be: “Answers the phone promptly and courteously.”
You can also make this more specific: “Answers the phone courteously on the first ring.”
Over to you
Behaviorally anchored rating scales will serve you well if you have the resources to support them.
This evaluation method can improve performance, engagement, and employee retention, as well as strengthen your culture. But done poorly, they will drive good people away, demotivate the people who remain, and have no positive impact on performance.
BARS is a popular practice worldwide that has withstood the test of time. You can easily find experienced partners who can guide you to success.
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