Hi. I'm Julie Tietz, and welcome to Conflict Resolution-- Putting the Pieces Together. Today we're going to have an overview of five conflict styles. And these conflict styles that we are going to talk about come from the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Styles Assessment.
And this is one of the most commonly-used assessment tools to determine a person's preferred conflict style. It's a short questionnaire with 30 questions, and these questions are about a person's likely behavior in a conflict. The assessment was developed in 1974 by Kenneth W. Thomas and Ralph H. Kilmann. That's where the Thomas-Kilmann name comes from-- the authors. And it's now known as one of the best means of assessing a person's conflicts style.
A lot of companies use this assessment with their employees so they know how to better interact with each other in a conflict situation, and can possibly see their point of view and where they're coming from based on their assessment style. If you have the opportunity to take this assessment, I think you would find it really interesting to see where you're coming from and how you would likely behave in a conflict.
We're going to go through all of the different styles right now, and maybe in the definitions you can see where you possibly would fit in with these different styles. So here's the graph of the placement of the different conflict styles from the assessment, and we'll go through each of these individually. So let's start with assertiveness.
And that's behavior in which a person confidently makes a statement without need of proof, affirming his or her rights without attacking another's. So on the graph, assertiveness is here on the axis. And somebody that is placed high is really confident, and they don't need any proof in affirming their rights. And somebody that is placed low is less confident, and is kind of unsure of his or her own rights, and may attack another's.
Next we have cooperativeness, and that's behavior in which two parties work in concert to achieve their mutual and respective individual goals. So here on the graph, the cooperativeness is on the axis. Somebody that is placed high would be willing to work with another party to achieve their goals, whereas opposite, somebody that is placed low would be less willing to work with another to achieve their goals.
And then we now have accommodating, which is the first of one of the five conflict styles, and it's a conflict resolution style in which one party helps out to meet another's needs at the expense of his or her own. So here on the graph we have accommodating, and that's placed high on cooperativeness and low in assertiveness. So here we are willing to set aside our needs and sacrifice our needs for somebody else's.
Next is avoiding-- a conflict resolution style in which one party does not attempt-- does not make any attempt to address or resolve the conflict. So here it's placed low on cooperativeness and assertiveness, and so here-- as the name implies, "avoiding--" does not want to do anything with the conflict.
Our next style is competing, and that's a conflict resolution style in which one party seeks to meet his or her own needs at the expense of another party's needs, sometimes also referred to as forcing. So competing, on the graph here, is placed high in assertiveness, and also low in cooperativeness.
So here we are not willing to work with another person, because we're placed low on cooperativeness, and assertiveness is we're really confident in our statements, and we don't need any proof. And so we're not really willing to work with other people here.
Next is compromising, and that is a conflict resolution style in which parties agree to sacrifice some of their needs in exchange for having others met. So compromising is in the middle here. And so here we have a little of both. So we are going to place in the middle on assertiveness and cooperativeness. We're willing to give a little, and take a little.
And then finally, we have collaborating. And that's a conflict resolution style in which parties work jointly to try to meet all of each other's needs, sometimes also referred to as problem-solving.
So here on the graph, collaborating is placed high in assertiveness and high in cooperativeness. So here we are willing to work to meet each other's needs, but we're also pretty confident in ourselves and in what our needs are, too. So here, preferred conflict style is the conflict style an individual most often or habitually uses.
So these styles are preferred by a person, but that's not the only strategy a person can use. All people are capable of using any of these styles that we briefly covered today given the particular context that they're in. But they do tend to work towards their preferred style.
And so going over the graph, again, of all the styles, we have competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, and accommodating. And I would encourage you to take this assessment if you have the opportunity to do so, so you can see where you fall in with each of these different styles thank you for taking the time out to view this tutorial, and I hope to catch you again next time.