The Five Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Styles Explained

A useful overview of the conflict resolution literature is available at Wikipedia: Conflict resolution. The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument remains the standard tool for assessing these styles in organisational settings.

Competing is high-assertiveness, low-cooperativeness. The competing style treats conflict as a contest to be won. The individual pursues their own goals at the expense of the other party's, uses positional power where available, and resists compromise that would reduce their outcome.

Collaborating is high-assertiveness, high-cooperativeness. The collaborating style treats conflict as a shared problem to be solved. Both parties' interests are taken seriously, creative solutions are sought, and the relationship is maintained throughout.

Compromising is moderate on both axes. Neither party gets what they fully wanted, but both get something. It is faster than collaborating but less likely to produce genuinely creative outcomes.

Avoiding is low-assertiveness, low-cooperativeness. The avoiding style withdraws from conflict, defers the issue, or denies that a conflict exists. It is the style of hoping the problem resolves itself.

Accommodating is low-assertiveness, high-cooperativeness. The accommodating style concedes to the other party's position, prioritising the relationship over the outcome. It preserves harmony at the cost of advocacy.

The research literature uses a slightly different vocabulary for the same five modes, following Rahim's inventory: integrating for collaborating, obliging for accommodating, dominating for competing, and avoiding and compromising as above. The studies cited below use those names.

How Each Big Five Dimension Predicts Your Conflict Style Default

Research mapping Big Five personality to conflict styles converges on a consistent set of associations. The most comprehensive single study remains Antonioni (1998) doi:10.1108/eb022814, who surveyed 351 students and, as a check on generalising beyond students, 110 managers. The pattern has since been pooled meta-analytically by Tehrani and Yamini (2020) doi:10.1016/j.paid.2019.109794 across 20 studies and 5,337 participants.

What replicates in this literature is the direction of each association, not its magnitude. Point estimates for any given trait-and-style pair move considerably from sample to sample, and neither Antonioni nor the meta-analysis supports a single headline coefficient for, say, Agreeableness and collaborating. The sections below therefore describe directions, which hold up, and avoid coefficients, which do not.

Agreeableness (Bond) → accommodating and avoiding

This is the most robust finding in the literature. Antonioni (1998) found Agreeableness positively related to both the obliging and the avoiding styles, and Tehrani and Yamini (2020) report the same two associations across their pooled samples. Individuals high in Agreeableness, high Bond in Cèrcol's framework, show a strong preference for accommodating and, to a lesser extent, avoiding. The underlying mechanism is clear: high-Bond individuals place high value on interpersonal harmony and experience conflict as genuinely aversive, not merely inconvenient. They are motivated to resolve the discomfort of conflict quickly, and the fastest route to resolution is to give the other party what they want.

Graziano, Jensen-Campbell and Hair (1996) doi:10.1037/0022-3514.70.4.820 supply the behavioural detail. Across five different kinds of interpersonal relationship, participants at both ends of the Agreeableness scale rated negotiation and disengagement as better tactics than power assertion, but participants low in Agreeableness rated power assertion as a better choice than high-agreeable participants did. The difference is not that agreeable people prefer harmony and disagreeable people prefer war; it is that power assertion stays on the menu for one group and comes off it for the other.

This is not pathological. Accommodation is often the right call, in contexts where the relationship matters more than the specific outcome, or where the other party's position is more informed. The risk arises when high-Bond individuals accommodate habitually, not selectively. Teams where everyone scores high on Bond can slide toward groupthink and an inability to surface honest disagreement, a phenomenon worth understanding alongside conflict style.

Conscientiousness (Discipline) → collaborating, not avoiding

High-Discipline individuals engage with conflict rather than sidestep it. Antonioni (1998) found Conscientiousness positively related to the integrating style and negatively related to avoiding, and Tehrani and Yamini (2020) report the same directions. Goal-directedness and self-regulatory capacity make the work of collaborating affordable: collaborating is more effort than the alternatives, and high-Discipline people are willing to spend it.

The trait that predicts both integrating and dominating is Extraversion, not Conscientiousness. Antonioni found Extraversion positively related to integrating and positively related to dominating, which is why a high-Presence colleague can look collaborative and combative within the same meeting. The Vision-Discipline tension in teams explores how this plays out when high-Discipline members clash with exploratory, Vision-oriented colleagues.

Openness to Experience (Vision) → collaborating

High-Vision individuals are consistent adopters of the collaborating style. Antonioni (1998) found Openness positively related to integrating and negatively related to avoiding, and Tehrani and Yamini (2020) report the same directions in their pooled data. Collaborating requires intellectual flexibility, genuine curiosity about the other party's perspective, and comfort with the ambiguity that arises when two people's interests do not obviously align. These are precisely the cognitive and motivational qualities associated with high Openness.

Neuroticism (Depth) → avoiding

High Depth, high Neuroticism, is a reliable predictor of conflict avoidance. Antonioni (1998) found Neuroticism positively related to avoiding and negatively related to dominating, and the meta-analytic pooling in Tehrani and Yamini (2020) confirms the positive Neuroticism-avoiding association. The threat sensitivity associated with high Neuroticism makes conflict feel particularly dangerous, not just uncomfortable. For individuals high in Depth, direct confrontation activates anxiety responses that make avoidance feel genuinely protective rather than merely expedient. Avoiding removes the threat stimulus.

Note that Depth is not alone here. Bond predicts avoidance too, for entirely different reasons, and in the pooled data both associations are present. A team can under-surface disagreement because people are anxious, because people are kind, or both, and the fix is not the same in the two cases.

The cost is that avoided conflicts rarely resolve. They accumulate. For high-Depth team members especially, the fear that confrontation will make things worse is real, but so is the evidence that non-confrontation tends to make things worse on a longer timeline. This dynamic is explored in depth in what personality conflict in teams actually looks like.

Extraversion (Presence) → competing

High Presence individuals are more likely to use the competing style. Antonioni (1998) found Extraversion positively related to the dominating style, and negatively related to avoiding. Their comfort with social assertiveness, preference for direct communication, and higher tolerance for interpersonal friction reduce the inhibition cost of taking a strong position publicly.

Which Conflict Resolution Style Produces the Best Team Outcomes?

This is where the literature is thinner than the management writing around it suggests, and where a claim that gets repeated constantly does not survive contact with its source.

The most cited meta-analysis in this area, De Dreu and Weingart (2003) doi:10.1037/0021-9010.88.4.741, is routinely invoked to show that collaborating beats the alternatives. It shows no such thing, because it did not measure conflict styles at all. What it measured was how much conflict of each type a team had. Relationship conflict correlated negatively with team performance (ρ = −.22). Task conflict, contrary to the then-standard view that disagreement about the work is productive, correlated negatively too (ρ = −.23). Conflict of both kinds was more damaging on complex decision-making and project tasks than on routine production tasks. No correlation in that analysis came out positive.

The claim that how a team argues matters more than how much it argues does have meta-analytic support, but from a different paper. DeChurch, Mesmer-Magnus and Doty (2013) doi:10.1037/a0032896 separated conflict states, meaning the source and intensity of perceived incompatibility, from conflict processes, meaning how teams actually behave while disagreeing, across 45 independent studies and 3,218 teams. Controlling for conflict states, conflict processes explained an additional 13% of the variance in both team performance and team affective outcomes, and the authors identify some processes as beneficial to teams and others as detrimental.

That is the defensible version of the argument for collaborating. Not that a named style has a known effect size on team performance, because nobody has established that, but that the behaviour a team chooses during disagreement carries weight independent of how much disagreement there is. Choosing it well is worth doing on that basis alone.

The important caveat is that collaborating is cognitively and emotionally expensive. It takes longer, requires greater tolerance for ambiguity, and demands that both parties bring the interpersonal skill and motivation to engage honestly. Teams under high time pressure, or teams where trust is low, may find compromising the practical optimum even if it is theoretically second-best. Building trust in teams is therefore a prerequisite for making the collaborating style consistently available.

When Mixed Conflict Styles Create a Meta-Conflict of Their Own

A team that contains one high-Bond accommodator, one high-Presence competitor, one high-Depth avoider, and one high-Vision collaborator is not better off just because of its diversity. Without explicit awareness of how those styles interact, the diversity becomes a source of confusion and frustration.

The competitor sees the accommodator as weak and the avoider as passive-aggressive. The accommodator experiences the competitor as aggressive and finds the collaborator exhausting (too much process before resolution). The avoider feels overwhelmed by the competitor and unsafe with the collaborator's directness. The collaborator feels unsupported by the avoider and frustrated by the competitor's refusal to explore creative solutions.

This is not a hypothetical scenario. It is what happens in many teams every time significant disagreement arises. The conflict style mismatch itself becomes a conflict. How to give personality-informed feedback offers practical tools for navigating these conversations productively.

The solution is not personality homogeneity, diversity in conflict style is genuinely useful in teams that can use it. The solution is explicit, pre-agreed team conflict protocols: how will we handle it when we disagree? What do we do when someone is avoiding? What does it mean when someone competes hard? Building these agreements before conflict arises, when no one's interests are yet at stake, is considerably more effective than improvising under pressure. It is also the part of this article with the strongest empirical backing, since it is the conflict process, not the amount of conflict, that DeChurch and colleagues found to carry independent variance.

Conflict Styles, Personality Profiles, and When Each Works

Conflict style	Personality profile	When it works	When it fails
Competing	High Presence	Emergencies; clear expertise advantage; adversarial negotiations	Destroys trust; shuts down collaborative problem-solving; escalates relationship conflict
Collaborating	High Vision + high Discipline, with Presence and Bond also positively associated	Complex, creative problems; high-trust contexts; long-term relationships	Too slow under time pressure; requires both parties' willingness and skill
Compromising	Positively associated with Bond, Presence, Vision and Discipline	Time-constrained settings; when good enough is genuinely enough	Leaves creative solutions undiscovered; can feel like loss to both parties
Avoiding	High Depth or high Bond, low Presence	When the issue is genuinely trivial; cooling-off periods before re-engagement	Conflicts accumulate; unresolved tensions corrode team functioning
Accommodating	High Bond	When the relationship outweighs the outcome; when the other party has superior information	Habitual accommodation signals that honesty is not valued; high-Bond members stop advocating

The profile column reports the directions found in Antonioni (1998) and Tehrani and Yamini (2020), not effect sizes. Read it as which traits tilt a person toward a style, not as a prediction about any individual.

Using Team Personality Data to Design Better Conflict Protocols

Cèrcol's Witness-based personality assessments provide teams with a composition map that makes conflict style tendencies visible before the conflict arrives. A team that can see that four of its five members score high on Bond and low on Depth has predictive information: this team is likely to under-surface disagreement and over-accommodate. Designing against that tendency, by creating explicit norms for voicing dissent, using anonymous pre-deliberation input, or rotating a designated challenger role, becomes a concrete and evidence-grounded act rather than a vague aspiration.

Understanding conflict style is not about predicting that someone will always compete or always avoid. It is about understanding the default setting, the response that arises before reflection kicks in. With that knowledge, teams can design better, not just hope for better.

See How Conflict Styles Show Up on Your Team

Understanding conflict style tendencies in the abstract is one thing; seeing them mapped to your actual team is another. Cèrcol's Witness assessment collects peer personality data across all five dimensions, including the Bond and Depth scores that most directly predict conflict avoidance and accommodation patterns. The Witness instrument is specifically designed to surface gaps between self-perception and how teammates actually experience someone, which is precisely where conflict-style blind spots tend to live. If your team regularly experiences friction without resolution, or consensus without genuine agreement, the personality composition data is often the most informative place to start. You can run a free assessment at cercol.team and explore the full 12-role framework that shows how trait combinations translate into team function.

Further reading: What personality conflict in teams actually looks like · How to give personality-informed feedback

Sources

Antonioni, D. (1998). Relationship between the Big Five personality factors and conflict management styles. International Journal of Conflict Management, 9(4), 336–355. doi:10.1108/eb022814
De Dreu, C. K. W., & Weingart, L. R. (2003). Task versus relationship conflict, team performance, and team member satisfaction: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88(4), 741–749. doi:10.1037/0021-9010.88.4.741
DeChurch, L. A., Mesmer-Magnus, J. R., & Doty, D. (2013). Moving beyond relationship and task conflict: Toward a process-state perspective. Journal of Applied Psychology, 98(4), 559–578. doi:10.1037/a0032896
Graziano, W. G., Jensen-Campbell, L. A., & Hair, E. C. (1996). Perceiving interpersonal conflict and reacting to it: The case for agreeableness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(4), 820–835. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.70.4.820
Tehrani, H. D., & Yamini, S. (2020). Personality traits and conflict resolution styles: A meta-analysis. Personality and Individual Differences, 157, 109794. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2019.109794

Conflict resolution styles and personality: the evidence