Conflict Management

Whether it’s petty fights between co-workers or a generally dysfunctional office environment, workplace conflict can dismantle an organization’s functional capabilities. Evidence suggests that organizations experiencing constant workplace conflict have increased turnover rates, employee dissatisfaction, and workplace absenteeism. Even though it’s nice to hope conflict will never arise in your office, the truth is that it’s inevitable. How your office incorporates conflict management, as well as takes the required steps before conflicts arise, can result in significant gains or losses to your organization’s bottom line.

Initiating proper and effective conflict management begins with understanding that individual employees experience different reactive tendencies in response to conflict, and thus handle conflict in different ways. To help facilitate this understanding, CPP publishes the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI^®), the world's best-selling tool for helping people understand how different conflict-handling styles affect interpersonal and group dynamics.

The TKI tool assesses an individual’s typical behavior in conflict situations and describes it along two dimensions: assertiveness and cooperativeness. It then provides detailed information about how that individual can effectively use five different conflict-handling styles, or modes—competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, and accommodating—to navigate the conflict. By knowing in advance their preferences toward these various dimensions and modes of managing conflictenables employees to communicate better with their co-workers when conflict arises, and empowers them to choose appropriate conflict styles for any workplace conflict situation.

By being given the opportunity to learn about each of the conflict-handling modes, determine their most commonly used mode, and understand which situations are best suited for certain modes, employees become more capable of knowing the right way to approach a co-worker in a time of conflict and gain a nonthreatening way in which to communicate differences in conflict management styles. In addition, conflict management training can not only help employees develop in their current position but also arm them with the skills needed to progress toward leadership. Holding conflict management workshops for both employees and managers within the organization ensures that everyone has a common language for defusing conflict situations.

Particularly in large organizations, the conflict-handling modes of company leaders often reflect (for better or worse) on the rest of the organization in a trickle-down fashion. Employees often look toward these leaders to see how they’re handling conflict and communicating as a clue to company culture and how to handle conflict in their own position.

Overall, the TKI assessment can be used 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. For more information on the TKI assessment, feel free to view the free webinar here: https://www.cpp.com/contents/webinars-intro.aspx#tki or contact us at mailto:custserv@cpp.com.