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Bill Phillips, a quiet 60-year-old NASA contract engineer, slipped past security at Johnson Space Center in Houston 10 days ago carrying a snub-nosed .38-calibre revolver and a printout of his most recent job performance review in a duffel bag.

Mr. Phillips stormed into his supervisor's office and, according to police, told him: "You're the guy who's going to get me fired."

He then shot his supervisor to death and took a co-worker hostage. After a three-hour standoff, he killed himself.

Police later discovered that Mr. Phillips bought the gun only a few days after his review, which said he was often late for meetings and that he was slow to correct his mistakes.

Mr. Phillips' violent action is an extreme example of the strain that afflicts thousands of workplaces during performance-review season, that anxious annual period when our livelihoods go on trial.

A growing number of companies are starting to look at shredding year-end employee evaluations for good under urging from a swelling chorus of management experts.

The Houston case can only bolster their argument: that traditional performance reviews are an outdated holdover from the industrial age, and should go the way of floppy disks and office ashtrays.

"It's the wrong tool now," says Fred Nickols, an organizational consultant and author of the influential article Don't Redesign Your Company's Performance Appraisal System, Scrap It!, published in 1997 in a work-force training magazine.

Annual reviews were designed by factory bosses to keep assembly-line workers productive.

This makes them ill-suited to managing today's work force, Mr. Nickols says.

"We have very few people with noses to the grindstone doing pre-configured routines these days."

Management experts generally agree that all employees need feedback, and the annual cycle gives bosses plenty of time to observe and record. But some experts now say those meagre benefits are not worth the torment yearly reviews inflict.

And, as was seen in Houston, employees bruised by bad reviews can even react violently.

Businesses are now so interested in developing alternatives to the annual appraisal that Boston-based David Maister, widely viewed as the guru of the anti-review movement, commands a fee of $20,000 (U.S.) for a day's consultation.

He and other experts say the problem with the annual critique is that, instead of stepping up afterward, many employees work hard to subvert the process.

Some view the two months preceding yearly reviews as a time to nail every deadline and exceed every goal. "Then they treat January to April as a breather," says Colleen Leung, a Toronto-based investment specialist at a Canadian bank who endures a review every year.

Working hard months and months before the appraisal can be seen as a waste of time.

"Let's say you really work your ass off in January," says Ms. Leung. "Because your performance review is in November, your boss won't remember it. Then if you have one little screw-up in October, that's all your boss will remember."

Old-fashioned sucking up can play a role in favourable reviews. Workers have learned to exploit the annual cycle with autumnal offerings of Timbits, coffee, chocolates and other strategic acts of kindness.

"We like to think we're invincible to someone brown-nosing," says Tom Anderson, head of SpaceAge Control, a California manufacturer of sensors for the aerospace and automotive industries that recently scrapped its annual review process. "But the person who likes the same sport as you, the person who brings doughnuts every morning, it's impossible not to let that rub off on you."

Meanwhile, a string of mediocre reviews can put some employees' careers in a years-long holding pattern.

"Sometimes the best people do not promote themselves. And they shouldn't have to," Mr. Anderson says.

On the management side, those who do the reviewing say evaluations can play an outsized role in making and breaking careers. Bonuses, perks and raises can all be tied to a few glib comments from a supervisor.

"We suddenly feel the weight of our godlike power," says Wayne Turmel, who muses about the foibles of corporate management on his blog, Cranky Middle Manager (http://cmm.thepodcastnetwork.com). "If I write a performance review that's not good, your kids are out on the street. How's that for motivation?"

Employees' efforts to play the system combined with managers' angst over giving bad reviews can render the process almost moot, says Susan Heathfield, who worked in training and organization development for two GM locations in the 1980s.

Ms. Heathfield was shocked to find that 96 per cent of the employees at a plant in Lansing, Mich., notched perfect scores on their annual reviews.

"When raises are tied to a person's annual evaluation, it's impossible for a manager to be honest," says Ms. Heathfield, who now consults on how to improve assessment procedures. "The whole system has to go the way of the dinosaur."

Some companies are starting to evolve, heeding the advice that the annual evaluation rite must be scrapped.

Two years ago, Jay Bertram, head of Canadian operations at global ad agency TBWA\, followed Mr. Maister's advice. Mr. Bertram scrapped his office's annual review system, and replaced it with regular performance conversations with the company's 92 Toronto-based employees.

Now, managers sit down every two weeks with their employees to go over goals. "I can just feel it working," he said. "Our to-do lists get done."

Mr. Turmel, a mid-level manager at a corporate training company in suburban Chicago, likes the idea of performance chats. But he doubts he could find time for them:

"This sounds like a good thing, but so does changing your oil every 3,000 miles."

Maister's mantra

Anti-review guru David Maister's advice: Instead of the big, once-a-year appraisal tied to pay scales, managers should assess and critique on a regular basis.

"Whenever we see that performance could be improved, we should say something immediately," he says. That way, managers are "tackling one topic at a time, right when it happens."

That means a better chance that performance will improve, he says.

ON THE WEB

Susan Heathfield takes questions on the power of performance reviews at 1 p.m. EDT on globeandmail.com/life.