The added viscoelastic dampers increase damping and stiffness of buildings and results in so called non-classical or non-proportional damping problem. In this system the eigenvectors of the undamped system may not diagonalize the damping matrix, and the system is generally analyzed by converting the equation of motion into a 2n first order state-space form. As this approach is complex and time-consuming compared to the classically damped problem, the system is often analyzed by neglecting the off-diagonal terms in the damping matrix. In this paper the theoretical background of the approximate approach is studied, and the vibration characteristics of a three-story shear building with a viscoelastic damper are investigated using the exact and approximate method. It is found that the approximate method may produce good result when the additional damping is small, but as the damping increases the error also increase.