Conflict styles: the 5 Thomas-Kilmann modes, and what Gottman saw when couples argued

Some people argue at full volume and settle everything in ten minutes. Others argue quietly and are still stuck on the same problem months later. Neither one is cheating. They're just running different conflict styles, and the difference between the two rarely sits in the intensity. It sits in the structure.

Organisational psychology has studied this for five decades, with a model that remains the most widely used in the world for describing how people handle disagreement: the five modes of Thomas and Kilmann. Meanwhile, in a different lab, John Gottman watched thousands of couples argue and identified patterns that predict more than the style alone. This article brings the two together: what the five modes say about you, and what Gottman's research adds about how you actually put them into practice.

Two questions, five possible answers

In the 1970s, researchers Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann proposed that a person's behaviour in conflict can be described from two simple questions. How far do you go to satisfy your own concerns, your assertiveness? And how far do you go to satisfy the other person's concerns, your cooperativeness?

The model drew on Robert Blake and Jane Mouton's managerial grid from the 1960s, which crossed concern for results with concern for people to describe leadership styles. Thomas and Kilmann applied the same logic to conflict, and the published result is the MODE instrument, described in a 1977 paper in Educational and Psychological Measurement, which remains the academic reference cited whenever the test comes up.

Crossing the two dimensions at low, medium and high produces five combinations, and each one maps onto one of the five modes.

The five modes, one by one

Competing. High assertiveness, low cooperativeness. You pursue what you want without much weight given to the other person's position. Useful in emergencies, when a fast decision matters more than consensus, and risky as a fixed pattern in a close relationship, because it treats disagreement as a zero-sum game.

Collaborating. High assertiveness, high cooperativeness. Both people look for a solution that serves each other's real interests, not just a split of what's on the table. It's the most expensive mode in time and energy, and the only one of the five built to resolve the root of the problem rather than manage it.

Compromising. Medium on both dimensions. Each person gives up a bit to reach a middle ground quickly. Practical when time is short, and unsatisfying when both sides walk away feeling they lost more than they gained.

Avoiding. Low assertiveness, low cooperativeness. You postpone, change the subject, leave the room. It isn't always weakness, sometimes it's the correct read that the moment is wrong or the topic isn't worth the wear. The risk is using avoidance as your only strategy, because avoided topics don't disappear, they accumulate.

Accommodating. Low assertiveness, high cooperativeness. You give in, often to protect the relationship or avoid friction. Generous when the topic matters more to the other person than to you, and corrosive when it becomes the only mode available, because your own needs stop entering the equation.

There's no good mode, only a well-fitted one

The most common mistake is reading this list as a ranking, with collaborating at the top and competing at the bottom. Research on the model says something else: each mode has contexts where it works and contexts where it fails, and real skill lies in shifting with the situation rather than fixing one mode as your identity.

Compromising is the right call in a last-minute negotiation, and the wrong one when the issue is structural and will resurface in the same shape weeks later. Avoiding protects a relationship from a pointless argument over a minor point, and wears it down if it becomes the answer to everything that bothers you. Most people have a dominant mode, the one they reach for most often, and one or two secondary modes they use in specific contexts. None of these patterns is fixed: it shifts with the other person, the topic, and your emotional state in the moment.

How it's measured, and where the test trips up

The original instrument, known today as the TKI, asks you to choose, between pairs of statements, which one better describes your behaviour. This format is called forced choice, or ipsative, and it carries a statistical limitation worth knowing before taking the result too seriously.

In a 1990 reanalysis published in the Academy of Management Journal, Evert van de Vliert and Boris Kabanoff tested the two most widely used conflict instruments of the time against the theory meant to support them, and found only moderate validity, with deviations from what the theory predicted. The underlying problem is the same one that affects other forced-choice tests: your score on one mode depends on how much you score on the others, because you're always choosing between them, and that makes it hard to compare two different people with any rigour. The result describes relative tendencies within you, not an absolute measure comparable from person to person.

What Gottman saw when couples argued

While the Thomas-Kilmann model describes your general disposition toward conflict, a different line of research, John Gottman's, looked at what actually happens during the argument itself, not just the label of the style.

In the most cited study of this line, Gottman and Robert Levenson filmed 73 married couples in a laboratory conflict conversation in 1983, measured heart rate and other physiological signals during the discussion, and recontacted them four years later, with a 92% response rate. What separated the couples who stayed together from those who had separated wasn't the topic of the argument, nor, on its own, each person's dominant mode. It was a set of specific behaviours within the argument itself: who stayed physiologically activated and couldn't calm down, which patterns of criticism and contempt showed up, and how often repair attempts appeared, the small signals that lower tension midway through an argument.

This separates two things that get confused easily. Your dominant mode, competing, avoiding or collaborating, tells you how you position yourself toward disagreement. The patterns Gottman documented tell you what happens inside that position, moment to moment, and that's where most of the predictive power lives. We've already covered those patterns in depth, including the ninety percent figure that circulates without context and the serious critique it received, in an article on difficult conversations in a relationship, worth reading alongside this one if your interest is the moment-to-moment mechanism rather than just the underlying style.

Conflict style isn't attachment style, but they talk to each other

Worth not confusing the two. Conflict style describes what you do once disagreement is already on the table. Attachment style describes what you expect from a close relationship before any conflict happens, and it helps explain why two people with the same dominant conflict mode react differently to the same disagreement.

An anxious attachment pattern tends to pull more toward accommodating or competing under stress, because the other person's silence gets read as a threat to the relationship. An avoidant pattern tends to pull toward avoiding, because the forced closeness of an argument is what causes the most discomfort. Neither pairing is a fixed rule, but it helps explain why the same conflict mode can have very different roots in different people, and it's one of the crossovers that Agapone's relational category reads together, rather than treating each piece in isolation.

Three questions for using this without falling into traps

Is the mode I'm using today a choice or a reflex? Most people never consciously decided to compete or avoid, it's simply what the body does under stress. Naming it is already the first step toward being able to choose a different mode when the situation calls for it.

Does this issue call for collaborating, or for a quick compromise? Not every disagreement deserves the investment of a full solution. Saving collaborating for the issues that genuinely matter, and using compromising or accommodating for the small ones, saves energy for when it's actually needed.

What happens after I use my dominant mode? If the relationship stays tense for days after you compete, or if the topic keeps coming back through the side door after you avoid it, the mode might be settling today's disagreement while creating a bigger one tomorrow. This is where the repair attempts Gottman's research describes, a partial apology, acknowledging the other person's point, matter more than switching modes. How you reconnect after a disagreement is also, at bottom, a question of intimacy: how much you let yourself be vulnerable in the moment of repair.

What to take with you

No conflict mode beats the others. Competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding and accommodating are different tools for different problems, and maturity lies in recognising what the moment calls for, not in always reaching for the same one. The test that measures this has real limitations, especially the forced-choice format that makes rigorous comparisons between people difficult, but the underlying theoretical structure it describes, assertiveness crossed with cooperativeness, remains a useful way to name what you do when someone disagrees with you. And what Gottman showed is that style is only half the story: what happens inside the argument, moment to moment, weighs as much or more than the label we give it.

Frequently asked questions

What are the 5 Thomas-Kilmann conflict styles?

Competing (high assertiveness, low cooperativeness), collaborating (both high), compromising (both medium), avoiding (both low) and accommodating (low assertiveness, high cooperativeness). Each mode crosses how much you pursue your own interests with how much you pursue the other person's.

What's the best conflict management style?

None is best in absolute terms. Each mode works well in certain contexts and fails in others: compromising settles a minor disagreement quickly, collaborating is worth the investment on a structural issue, and avoiding protects against a pointless argument, but wears the relationship down if it becomes the answer to everything. The skill lies in shifting with the situation.

Is the conflict style test reliable?

It has moderate validity. The forced-choice format used in the original instrument makes rigorous comparison between different people difficult, because each mode's score depends on how much you score on the others. It's more useful as a read on your relative tendencies than as an absolute measure.

What did John Gottman discover about how couples argue?

By observing 73 couples in conflict and recontacting them four years later, Gottman and Levenson showed that what most separated those who stayed together from those who had separated wasn't the conflict style itself, but specific behaviours within the argument, such as patterns of criticism, prolonged physiological activation, and how often repair attempts occurred.

Are conflict style and attachment style the same thing?

No. Conflict style describes what you do once a disagreement is already underway. Attachment style describes what you expect from a close relationship, and it helps explain why two people with the same dominant conflict mode can arrive there through very different emotional paths.

Agapone reads your conflict pattern alongside other layers, like attachment and personal values, so the read on how you relate is more than a single isolated label. If you want to see that read in practice, visit Agapone and explore your profile.