The Thomas-Kilman Conflict Mode Instrument
Discover How You Handle Conflict!
- Conflict management—identify different conflict-handling styles and learn how to choose the appropriate style for any situation
- Team building—improve teamwork by helping members reconcile differences and work together more effectively
- Leadership development—enhance leaders’ conflict management and resolution skills
- Performance improvement—help eliminate barriers to effective personnel performance
- Stress reduction—give employees the capacity and tools to identify and manage workplace stress
- Retention—build a stronger organization and retain the best talent by helping employees be successful, improve morale, and stay engaged
Download a sample report!
Make Conflict Work for You
Use the TKI to help make conflict work for you and turn conflict into a positive event. The TKI has been used successfully to help individuals in a variety of settings understand how different conflict styles affect personal and group dynamics. 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. 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.
Elevate Performance
Use the TKI to elevate performance. The TKI identifies a person’s preferred conflict-handling mode, or style, and provides detailed information about how he or she can effectively use all five modes—competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, and accommodating. Using the TKI, individuals can learn to move beyond conflict and focus on achieving organizational goals and business objectives. Organizations can apply the TKI to such challenges as change management, team building, leadership development, stress management, negotiation, and communication. The TKI has been used successfully by businesses, educators, and organizational development professionals for over 30 years. It can be used as a stand-alone tool or as part of a comprehensive training program. Use it in your organization as the foundation for developing a common language that helps people think effectively and communicate clearly about conflict and how to manage it.
Why It's Popular
- Facilitates learning by using five practical, situation-specific styles for dealing with conflict effectively (competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, accommodating)
- Helps trainers, managers, and other professionals open productive one-on-one and group discussions around conflict
- Reflects today’s gender, racial, ethnic, age, and job-level diversity in the workplace—based on an updated normative sample
- Is quick (30 items, takes just 15 minutes) and easy to understand