Fear of how an employee will respond is the No. 1 reason managers say they delay and sometimes completely abandon performance conversations.  In fact, Many managers feel there is no way to adequately predict and prepare for an employee's response to feedback and are, therefore, convinced things will spin out of control.   

In reality, most performance issues will elicit a fairly predictable range o responses from employees, some of them even positive. We have identified the Top 10 Employee Reactions and suggest eff ective ways of addressing each. Understanding these reactions and what to do if confronted by them has moved countless managers to take on challenging and potentially volatile performance issues.

The 10 Most Common Responses to Feedback and How to Respond to Them article offers:

Techniques and the words for managing performance discussions when the employee responds to feedback by:

• Making invalid excuses
• Continuing to ask for examples even after you have already gone through an exaustive review!
• Won't agree with the feedback and virtually refuses to change their performance
• Blaming others (including you)
• Being non-committal ("ok, I'll try my best but can't make any promises")
• Asking why their previous manager never raised the issue (implying, "this was never a problem when I worked for Joe, so who are you to bring this up"?)
• Asking why you hadn't brought up a long standing issue in the past either through conversation or the performance evaluation process (this is a valid employee response but there's a nice way to address this and move the conversation forward at the same time).
• Responding with a "what are you going to do, FIRE me?".  Virtually implying you can't do anything about their performance and can't get rid of them either!