How Do You Handle Conflict?
The move you make when the room gets tense
Everyone has a default. Some people go straight at the problem, some smooth it over, some go quiet and hope it passes. None of the five styles is wrong - the trouble starts when you use the same one for every situation. Ten questions will show you yours.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Think about disagreements that actually matter to you - at work, at home, with people you cannot simply avoid.
What it measures
Where you sit on two independent concerns: how hard you push for your own outcome, and how much weight you give to the other person's. The five familiar styles are combinations of those two.
Based on: Dual-concern model of conflict (Blake & Mouton; Thomas & Kilmann)
Possible results
The Collaborator
You want the answer that actually works for both
The Contender
You argue to be right, and often you are
The Accommodator
The relationship matters more to you than the point
The Avoider
You would rather the whole thing simply went away
The Dealmaker
Half each, and let us get on with the day
Common questions
Is one style better than the others?
No, and that is the central finding of the model. Each style is correct in some situations and damaging in others - avoiding is right for trivia, competing is right in emergencies, accommodating is right when you are wrong. The problem is not which style you have, it is only having one.
My style changes at work and at home. Is that normal?
Very. Power, safety and how much you care about the relationship all shift the calculation. Many people compete at work and accommodate at home, or the reverse. Notice which context brings out your least useful pattern - that is where the work is.
Can I learn a different style?
Yes - conflict style is behaviour, not temperament, and it responds well to deliberate practice. The usual route is to pick one recurring, low-stakes situation and handle it differently on purpose, three or four times, until the new move stops feeling foreign.
Sources
- Blake, R. R., & Mouton, J. S. (1964). The Managerial Grid. Gulf Publishing.
- Thomas, K. W. (1976). Conflict and conflict management. Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology.
- Rahim, M. A. (1983). A measure of styles of handling interpersonal conflict. Academy of Management Journal. doi:10.2307/255985
An honest note The five styles come from a framework that has been taught for sixty years, and that longevity is not the same as strong measurement. The model itself is a sensible map of two concerns - how much you want your own outcome, and how much you want theirs - but the questionnaires built on it, including the best-known commercial one, have been criticised for weak psychometric properties, and versions that force a choice between two options give different results from versions that ask you to rate each one. Two more limits. Conflict style is heavily situational: most people fight differently with a partner, a parent and a manager, and differently again depending on how much power they have in the room, so this describes a tendency rather than a trait. And no style is best. The evidence on which approach works is mixed and depends on what the conflict is about, so read your result as a habit to be aware of rather than as one to correct.