The five methods of conflict resolution are competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, and accommodating. These come from the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI), a framework developed by organizational psychologists Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann. The model maps each style along two axes: assertiveness (how much you prioritize your own concerns) and cooperativeness (how much you prioritize the other person’s concerns). No single style is always right. The best approach depends on the stakes, the relationship, and the situation.
Competing
Competing is high in assertiveness and low in cooperativeness. You pursue your own concerns at the other person’s expense, using whatever leverage or authority you have to win. This is a power-oriented approach: you’re focused on getting your outcome, not on finding common ground.
Competing gets a bad reputation, but it has legitimate uses. When you’ve already explored options together and now need to divide limited resources, someone has to advocate firmly for their position. It also fits situations where a quick, decisive action is needed, like enforcing a safety policy or meeting an immovable deadline. The downside is obvious: overuse damages relationships, shuts down open communication, and can make people afraid to raise concerns around you. If you default to competing in every disagreement, you’ll eventually find that colleagues stop bringing you problems at all.
Collaborating
Collaborating is high in both assertiveness and cooperativeness. You work with the other person to find a solution that fully satisfies both sides. This means digging into each party’s underlying interests rather than just trading positions back and forth.
Research from Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation identifies collaboration as generally the most effective style for building sustainable agreements and productive long-term relationships. If two departments are fighting over budget allocation, collaborating might reveal that one team needs funding now while the other needs headcount next quarter, opening up a solution that raw compromise would miss.
The tradeoff is time and effort. Collaboration requires honest dialogue, creative problem-solving, and mutual trust. For minor disagreements or situations where a decision is needed immediately, the investment often isn’t worth it. But for high-stakes conflicts where you’ll need to work with the other person going forward, it’s almost always the best path.
Compromising
Compromising sits in the middle of both axes. Each side gives up something to reach a mutually acceptable outcome. It’s faster than full collaboration but leaves both parties only partially satisfied.
Compromise works well for resolving minor issues efficiently. If two coworkers disagree on a meeting schedule, splitting the difference is sensible. It’s also useful when you’re running low on time and need a workable-enough answer to move forward. But compromise is not the same as true collaboration. When you split the difference, you may be leaving better solutions on the table. If both sides walk away feeling like they lost something important, the agreement may not hold up over time.
Avoiding
Avoiding is low in both assertiveness and cooperativeness. You sidestep the conflict entirely, neither pursuing your own concerns nor addressing the other person’s. The disagreement goes unresolved, at least for now.
This sounds passive, but strategic avoidance can be smart. When emotions are running high, stepping away gives everyone time to cool down before saying something they’ll regret. It’s also reasonable when the issue is genuinely trivial or when you’re dealing with a volatile person who isn’t ready for a productive conversation. The risk is that avoidance becomes a habit. Unresolved conflicts tend to fester. A small frustration you sidestep in January can become a major resentment by June, especially if the other person interprets your silence as indifference.
Accommodating
Accommodating is the opposite of competing: low in assertiveness, high in cooperativeness. You set aside your own concerns to satisfy the other person’s. There’s an element of self-sacrifice in this approach.
Accommodating can be the right call when preserving the relationship matters more than winning the point. If a supervisor is upset and the situation calls for immediate de-escalation, yielding on a low-stakes issue can defuse tension and build goodwill. It’s also appropriate when you realize the other person is simply right, or when the issue matters far more to them than it does to you. The danger is chronic accommodation. If you always give in, people learn to expect it. Over time, your own needs go unmet, and you may start to feel resentful, which ironically creates more conflict down the road.
Choosing the Right Style
Most people have a default conflict style they lean on, but effective conflict resolution means matching your approach to the situation. A few questions can help you choose:
- How important is the outcome to you? If the stakes are high, competing or collaborating makes more sense than avoiding or accommodating.
- How important is the relationship? If you’ll work closely with this person for years, accommodating on small issues and collaborating on big ones protects the partnership. If this is a one-time negotiation, competing may be appropriate.
- How much time do you have? Collaboration takes the most time. Compromise, competing, and accommodating are faster. Avoiding buys time but doesn’t resolve anything.
- Are emotions running hot? If so, avoiding temporarily (then returning to collaborate) often produces better results than forcing a conversation in the moment.
Applying These Styles at Work
In a workplace setting, especially on remote or hybrid teams, conflict often escalates simply because people lack the informal, in-person interactions that build trust. Weekly update meetings give leaders a chance to spot task, relationship, and process conflicts early, before they harden into real problems. Encouraging casual, off-the-clock communication (virtual coffee chats, non-work Slack channels) has been shown to reduce conflict on virtual teams by strengthening personal connections.
Leaders who want their teams to handle disagreements well should keep all communication channels open and accessible. When people feel comfortable raising concerns early, you get more opportunities to collaborate or compromise before anyone feels the need to compete. Building a shared sense of group identity, with clearly communicated goals and values, also helps. When everyone understands the bigger picture they’re working toward, individual disagreements are easier to frame as problems to solve together rather than battles to win.
The five styles aren’t personality types you’re locked into. They’re tools. The more deliberately you choose which one to use, the more control you have over how conflicts play out and how your relationships hold up afterward.