Conflict Skills – How to Improve?

Self-awareness to your own conflict-handling style can be a very beneficial start to improving your own conflict resolution and conflict management skills.

A leading conflict-handling self-assessment tool is the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI), which has been used successfully for more than 30 years to help individuals in a variety of settings understand how different conflict styles affect personal and group dynamics.

TKI Report – What is it?

The TKI measures five “conflict-handling modes,” or ways of dealing with conflict: competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, and accommodating. These five modes can be described along two dimensions, assertiveness and cooperativeness. Assertiveness refers to the extent to which one tries to satisfy his or her own concerns, and cooperativeness refers to the extent to which one tries to satisfy the concerns of another person (Thomas & Kilmann, 1974, 2007). Competing is assertive and not cooperative, and accommodating is cooperative and not assertive. Avoiding is neither assertive nor cooperative, while collaborating is both assertive and cooperative. Compromising falls in the middle on both dimensions.

For more information, read the TKI-Technical-Brief.

TKI Online Assessment – How do you do it?

Individuals respond to the 30 items on the TKI tool, the items are scored, and respondents see which of the five conflict-handling modes they tend to use relatively often and which modes they use less frequently. Their percentile scores compare how frequently they use a mode with how frequently members of the norm group use the mode. Scores are grouped in three categories: high (scores that fit in the top 25% of the norm group’s scores on a conflict-handling mode), medium (scores that fit in the middle 50%), and low (scores that fit in the bottom 25%).

Check out a TKI Sample Report.