Understanding Your Conflict Style — The Thomas-Kilmann Instrument
The Conversation You Keep Having the Same Way
You are three minutes into a disagreement about restructuring the call schedule, and you already know how this ends. You will back off. Or you will dig in. Or you will suggest splitting the difference before anyone has said what they need.
A conflict style assessment won't tell you something you've never felt. It names the pattern you already live in. That naming is where things start to change.
The Thomas-Kilmann Instrument is the conflict style assessment I use most often with physicians in academic medicine. It maps directly onto the kinds of tension you face every week -- with your chair, your peers, your trainees, and the administration.
What the TKI Actually Gives You
Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann designed the instrument around two axes: assertiveness and cooperativeness. Those two dimensions produce five conflict-handling modes -- competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, and accommodating. You have access to all five. But most people default to one or two without thinking about it.
The assessment takes about fifteen minutes. The results give you a profile showing how frequently you lean on each mode relative to the general population. You are not "an avoider." You are someone who uses avoidance more often than most -- and probably underuses something else.
Ralph Kilmann made this point in his 2011 reflection on the instrument's development. The goal was never to label people. It was to expand their behavioral repertoire. A physician who can only compete or only accommodate is working with two gears when the job requires five.
How a Conflict Style Assessment Changes Your Relationships
Here's where I see the real value of the conflict style assessment for physicians. It's not an abstract personality exercise. It shows up in your specific relationships at work.
With Your Chair or Dean
If your default is accommodating, you say yes to things you shouldn't. You absorb extra clinical time, agree to committee work that doesn't align with your goals, and swallow frustrations until they harden into resentment. Your chair thinks everything is fine. It isn't.
If your default is competing, you push back on everything, including things that don't warrant a fight. Your chair starts to see you as difficult rather than principled.
With Peers
Avoiding is the silent killer of peer relationships in academic medicine. You don't address the authorship issue. You don't talk about the inequitable distribution of teaching. You let it fester. A 2008 study by de Dreu and colleagues in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that conflict avoidance in teams is associated with lower trust and worse decision quality -- even more than open disagreement.
With Trainees and Staff
If you default to compromising with people who have less power than you, you might think you're being fair. But trainees often experience a compromise offer from a faculty member as a directive. They agree because the power differential makes it hard to push back. Collaborating takes more time, but it surfaces what they actually need.
One Analogy That Helps
I sometimes compare it to a basketball player who can only drive right. A good defender figures that out in the first quarter and takes it away. If you can only compete or only avoid, the people around you adapt -- and the dynamic calcifies.
The TKI is like game film. It shows you the pattern so you can develop the other moves.
What Changes After You See Your Profile
The physicians I coach don't usually need to learn an entirely new conflict mode. They need permission and practice to use the ones they've been underusing.
The accommodator needs to try competing on something small and survive the discomfort. The competitor needs to sit with a collaborating conversation long enough to hear what the other person actually wants. The avoider needs to walk into one difficult conversation this week and see that the relationship doesn't end.
I worked with a vice chair who scored very high on competing and very low on accommodating. Her faculty were afraid to bring her problems. Once she saw the profile, she started experimenting -- asking questions before stating her position in two meetings a week. Within a month, two faculty members told her something had shifted. They couldn't name it. She could.
The Assessment Is Not the Work
Taking the TKI gives you data. But data sitting in a drawer changes nothing.
The real work happens when you connect your profile to the relationships that matter most. Where is your default serving you well? Where is it costing you? What would it look like to try a different approach in one specific interaction this week?
Those questions are where growth actually lives. The conflict style assessment just gives you the map.
Conflict patterns don't just affect individuals -- they shape entire departments. Learn about coaching for departments and how shared understanding of conflict styles can change the way your team works together.
