Conflict Management

What is conflict management?

Conflict management is the use of the right skills, processes, and techniques to handle disagreement or dispute in a deliberate way. At its core, it’s about resolving a tense situation through collaboration, active listening, and clear communication, rather than letting things spiral.

Organizations today bring together people from wildly different locations, ages, backgrounds, and viewpoints. As remote work becomes the norm, that diversity only grows, since geography no longer limits who gets hired for a role.

In a workplace like that, disagreements are bound to happen. People from different backgrounds naturally see things differently.

In fact, around 85% of employees experience some degree of conflict at work. Conflict is simply part of organizational life, which is exactly why managing it well matters so much.

Given that people spend roughly 8-9 hours a day at work, a conflict-heavy environment takes a real toll on productivity and well-being. Notably, 57% of employees report having experienced confrontational workplace conflict that led to personal insult or injury.

That’s part of why HR plays such a central role here. HR can shape a more positive environment by:

• Building inclusive cultures that prevent conflict before it starts
• Prioritizing strong employee relations
• Improving communication, mutual respect, and productivity
• Equipping managers with the skills to resolve conflict effectively

What causes workplace conflict?

A few common causes, drawing on N.S.B.A. (2007):

Trust issues. A perceived breach of trust tends to trigger emotional conflict and disrupt workplace harmony.

Unresolved disagreements. The longer something sits unaddressed, the more intense it gets when it resurfaces. Resolving things sooner rather than later matters.

Miscommunication. Unclear messages and simple errors cause frustration, and it’s one of the most common conflict sources around.

Personality clashes. Personalities differ for genetic reasons, according to researchers, which naturally creates friction between certain combinations of people.

Differing values. Different life experiences shape different beliefs and decisions, sometimes rooted in personal ethics or emotion.

Underlying stress. The general pace of modern life adds stress that bleeds into workplace conflict.

Ego. The need to be “right” fuels defensiveness, which can escalate disputes further.

What are the 5 conflict management styles?

The goal isn’t to eliminate conflict entirely, it’s to handle it well. Poorly managed conflict drags down morale, damages relationships, and gets in the way of actual goals.

Resolving conflict generally calls for collaboration, controlling emotional reactions, protecting people’s dignity and self-esteem, listening with genuine empathy, and being upfront about concerns rather than letting them fester. It also means keeping personal ego out of how you manage the situation. Here are five well-known models for thinking about conflict management styles.

Mary Follett, 1940. Follett was the first to identify three core conflict styles: domination, compromise, and integration. She later added avoidance and suppression, bringing the total to five. Her work helped shift organizational theory away from rigid scientific management toward human relations and contingency thinking.

Rahim and Bonoma, 1979. Afzalur Rahim and Thomas Bonoma built a two-dimensional model based on concern for self versus concern for others. Concern for others means addressing other people’s needs, sometimes at your own expense; concern for self means prioritizing your own needs. From this, five approaches emerge: avoiding (withdrawing from the conflict), obliging (accommodating the other side), integrating (finding a mutually beneficial solution), dominating (using power or authority to resolve it), and compromising (meeting somewhere in the middle).

Thomas-Kilmann Model, 1974. This one breaks conflict styles into competing, avoiding, compromising, accommodating, and collaborating, plotted across two axes: assertiveness and cooperativeness.

• Competing is high assertiveness, low cooperativeness, often used when one side wants to win outright.
• Avoiding is the opposite: low on both, simply sidestepping the conflict.
• Accommodating is low assertiveness, high cooperativeness, prioritizing the other person’s needs over your own.
• Collaborating is high on both, working toward a solution that genuinely benefits everyone.
• Compromising sits in the middle on both dimensions, each side gives a little to reach common ground.

Worth noting: avoiding scores low on both dimensions, which is why it’s often described as a lose-lose approach, choosing not to decide is still a decision.

Linda Putnam and Charmaine Wilson, 1982. This model offers three styles: non-confrontation (obliging), solution-oriented (integrating), and control (dominating). Non-confrontation minimizes or sidesteps disagreement. Solution-oriented looks for creative, integrative answers, sometimes involving compromise. Control relies on persistent, assertive pressure, verbal or nonverbal, to hold one’s position.

Suping and Jing, 2006. Often cited as one of the most widely used models in both research and practice, this one similarly maps conflict handling along cooperativeness and assertiveness, producing five distinct approaches people draw on in everyday disputes.

Conflict management vs. conflict resolution

These aren’t the same thing. Conflict resolution is about actually solving or settling a dispute. Conflict management is broader, it’s about mediating, handling, and coping with conflict over time.

Resolution tends to work for short-term disagreements that both sides are willing to work through. Management is what you need for the deeper, more persistent issues baked into an ongoing relationship.

How to resolve workplace conflict

Left unaddressed, workplace conflict can do real damage, and ignoring things like verbal abuse, harassment, or simmering resentment eventually erodes culture and, eventually, performance.

One useful framework, the Diagnosis and Intervention Model, suggests starting by diagnosing the root cause, then examining communication breakdowns, interpersonal dynamics, and organizational structures, before rolling out targeted interventions like training or improved communication protocols.

A few practical approaches that tend to help:

• Clear communication between the parties involved
• Active listening, so everyone feels genuinely heard
• Mediation, bringing in a neutral third party where needed
• Identifying the actual issue clearly, rather than working around it
• Finding common ground to build a resolution on
• Empathy, fostered across the team
• Compromise, with everyone willing to give a little
• Clear policies that address potential sources of conflict before they escalate
• Training on conflict resolution and interpersonal communication
• Following up over time to confirm the resolution actually holds

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Who came up with conflict response styles?
The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, developed by psychologists Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann, is the model most associated with this.

2. What are common types of workplace conflict?
Leadership conflict, workstyle conflict, creative conflict, personality conflict, task-based conflict, and conflict between individual employees are among the most common.

3. How do I pick the right conflict management style for a situation?
If preserving the relationship matters most, lean toward a non-aggressive or accommodating approach. If getting a practical outcome matters more, compromise or competing styles tend to work better.