Thomas-Kilmann conflict modes: five ways to handle conflict

Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann published their conflict mode instrument in 1974, building on earlier work by Blake and Mouton. Their move was to stop treating conflict style as a personality type and describe it as behaviour on two independent dimensions:

• Assertiveness — the extent to which you try to satisfy your own concerns
• Cooperativeness — the extent to which you try to satisfy the other party's concerns

Those two axes produce five modes. The important claim, and the one most often ignored by people who have sat through the questionnaire, is that all five are appropriate somewhere and skilled managers can use each of them deliberately.

The five modes

Two structural points are worth understanding properly.

Avoiding is not the same as neglect. Thomas and Kilmann treat it as an active choice — postponing until the right moment, or deciding an issue is not worth the cost of raising it. The failure mode is unconscious avoidance, where a manager avoids everything uncomfortable and calls it keeping the peace.

Overuse and underuse are both diagnoses. The instrument reports where you sit relative to a norm group, and the useful reading is not "I'm a compromiser" but "I compromise in situations that warranted collaborating, because compromise feels safe and is quicker." Kilmann's own later writing pushes hard on this: the goal is situational range, not a favourite.

Applied in a UK workplace

A service delivery manager in an IT support business has four live conflicts in the same week. The point of the model is that they warrant four different modes.

1. A field engineer is skipping the electrical safety check to hit response targets. Competing. This is not a negotiation, and treating it as one signals that safety is tradeable. The manager states the requirement, documents the conversation, and escalates the target problem separately — because the underlying cause is a target that made the shortcut rational.

2. Two team leaders both want the same senior engineer on their project. Collaborating, and worth the time. The manager gets both in a room and asks what each actually needs — one needs three days of specialist configuration, the other needs someone to mentor a new starter for a month. The apparent zero-sum fight over one person dissolves into two different requirements. This is what collaborating is for: the positions conflict, the interests do not.

3. A customer wants a contract variation, and the sales lead wants to refuse on principle. Compromising. Both parties have a reasonable case, the relationship matters, and the deadline is Friday. A time-limited variation with a review point gives each side most of what they need without a week of analysis.

4. A long-running disagreement about whose responsibility it is to update the asset register. Avoiding — temporarily and explicitly. The new asset management system goes live in six weeks and will settle it. The manager says so out loud, sets a date to revisit, and moves on. Silent avoidance would have been a failure; announced deferral is a decision.

5. And the one that is easy to get wrong. A team member insists on a documentation format the manager thinks is over-engineered. Accommodating. The manager is not confident they are right, the person doing the work cares a great deal, and the cost of being wrong is low. Spending assertiveness here would spend goodwill needed for item 1.

Criticisms and limitations

• It measures self-reported preference, not skill. The instrument is a forced-choice questionnaire about what you think you would do. Knowing that collaborating is right does not mean you can facilitate it, and results correlate imperfectly with observed behaviour.
• Social desirability pressure is obvious. Almost everybody knows collaborating is the answer with the best reputation, which distorts self-report and makes group debriefs oddly uniform.
• It abstracts away power. The model treats the two parties symmetrically. In a real workplace, "collaborating" with someone who controls your appraisal is not the same activity as collaborating with a peer, and accommodating may be a rational survival response rather than a chosen mode. The model's silence on power is its biggest practical gap.
• It says nothing about the source of the conflict. Task, process and relationship conflict behave very differently — task conflict can improve decisions, relationship conflict rarely does — and the same mode applied to each produces different results. Mode selection without diagnosis is guesswork.
• Culture and gender norms shape what registers as assertive. Identical behaviour is read differently depending on who does it, which affects both self-report and how a chosen mode lands.
• Repeated use has effects the snapshot misses. Accommodating once builds goodwill; accommodating always trains the other party to escalate. The model describes single episodes, not the pattern.

At Level 5 the strongest use is to pair the mode choice with a diagnosis of the conflict type and an honest note on the power dynamic.

How to evidence this in your ILM portfolio

Conflict evidence is the hardest kind to gather for a portfolio, because the documents are sensitive and the events are not scheduled. Plan for it.

Level 5 — Unit 525 Managing stakeholder relationships, where evaluating approaches to managing conflict and applying conflict management techniques are explicit criteria, and Unit 503 Managing people. Evidence that works:

• A professional discussion with your assessor about two real conflicts you handled with different modes, and why. This is often the best route, because it avoids putting confidential detail in writing.
• A reflective account with the parties anonymised, covering the type of conflict, the mode you chose, the power dynamic, the outcome and what you would do differently.
• Products of work where they exist and can be shared: a mediated agreement, revised terms of reference, a documented escalation, notes of a difficult one-to-one.
• A witness testimony from your manager or a party to the conflict confirming your handling.

Level 3 — Unit 303 Managing the performance of others for performance-related conflict, Unit 312 Effective communication where the evidence is about influencing and negotiation, and Unit 315 Developing a high performing team for team-level friction.

Two cautions. Anything relating to a live grievance, disciplinary or capability process needs care: check your organisation's policy before referencing it, redact names and identifying detail, and where the matter is formal it is usually better to evidence a different conflict. And avoid presenting a conflict where you were the aggrieved party as evidence of your management skill — assessors are looking for what you did as a manager.

See observation and professional discussion for how the discussion route works and witness testimony examples for the wording.

Where to go next

• Tuckman's stages of group development — the storming stage this model equips you for.
• Goleman's six leadership styles — style flexibility, the same idea applied to leadership.
• Observation and professional discussion — evidencing sensitive situations.
• Ready to qualify? Compare ILM Level 3 and ILM Level 5.