Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode
Instrument TKI®

Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI): Is the world’s best-selling assessment for understanding how different conflict-handling styles affect interpersonal and group dynamics. It’s also a fast and powerful tool that can go beyond conflict management to support your team-building, leadership and coaching, and retention goals. The research-backed TKI offers a practical way to initiate safe and nonemotional dialogue to resolve conflict. That’s why it’s ideal for use in so many different situations. It can also improve organizational productivity by helping people gain insight into their own and others’ behavior—which in turn helps them make better choices about outcomes.

HISTORY: The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI) was developed as a research tool by Kenneth W. Thomas and Ralph H. Kilmann in the early 1970s. The instrument is based on theoretical refinements by Kenneth Thomas of a model of management styles proposed by Robert Blake and Jane Mouton in the 1960s.

The TKI model is based on a five-category scheme for classifying interpersonal conflict-handling modes: competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, and accommodating. Thomas and Kilmann ensured that the TKI statement pairs were evenly matched in terms of desirability, so that no conflict-handling mode sounded more attractive than the others.

The TKI has been used for more than 35 years and is the leading measure of conflict-handling behavior. For most of that time the instrument was available only in a self-scorable paper-and-pencil format, which made administration easy but also made it difficult to retrieve a large group of client results and conduct analyses on those results. In 2002, the TKI assessment became available via the Internet using CPP’s online assessment delivery system, the SkillsOne® Web site. With online administration, data are collected as part of CPP’s ongoing commercial operations.

Over time these operations created a large archive of completed TKI assessments. The archive provided a vast pool of participants from which a large representative norm sample could be developed, making it possible for CPP’s Research Division to develop updated norms for the instrument to use as the basis for scoring and determining results.

The "Renorming Project," completed in 2007, is composed of 4,000 men and 4,000 women, ages 20 through 70, who were employed full-time in the United States at the time they completed the assessment. Data were drawn from a database of 59,000 cases collected between 2002 and 2005 and were sampled to ensure representative numbers of people by organizational level and race/ethnicity.

SAMPLE TKI REPORT:

TKI Conflict Mode Report PDF

USE & APPLICATION: Today the TKI is available in online and self-scorable formats and is used in a wide variety of applications, including: Management and supervisory training, Negotiation training, Team building, Leadership development, and Safety training. The TKI measures preferences for five different styles of handling conflict, called conflict modes: Competing, Collaborating, Compromising, Accommodating, and Avoiding. The five modes are described along two dimensions—assertiveness, or the extent to which one tries to satisfy his or her own concerns; and cooperativeness, or the extent to which one tries to satisfy the concerns of another person:

Competing: assertive and not cooperative

Collaborating: assertive and cooperative

Compromising: in the middle on both dimensions

Accommodating: cooperative and not assertive

Avoiding: neither assertive nor cooperative

How To Take The TKI® Instrument

FIRST: You have to be a client or on the staff of a client and have received a letter, email, or phone call with instructions from us on which assessment instruments to complete. If you are not a client and interested in taking the TKI, we will be happy to work with you; however, we need to be contacted with a phone call to review your unique situation in order to prepare for you an engagement letter for you to sign and return.

SECOND: You must not be under any stress or feel like you have to take the TKI. You should have a “Shoes Off Mind-Set" and try not to answer questions in a work vs. private life mode - Answer the questions being true to who you are. Let yourself be pulled to the answer that is most preferable to your personality. The TKI is voluntary - no one can require you to take the TKI.

THIRD: Your results is confidential. No one will know your reported scores without your permission. It’s also important for you to know that it is unethical for TKI information to be used in making career decisions on others. All types excel in all jobs for a wide range of reasons. In addition, know that the TKI is NOT an IQ test, it’s only an instrument that gives an indication how you see the behavior of others and others see your behavior.

FOURTH: Take the TKI Instrument by clicking on the SkillsOne Logo below, which will take you to the Strategic Path Group SkillsOne.com page. Log into the site using the following information in lower case type:

LOGIN: strategic

PASSWORD: path

User ID: Will be assigned to you if you do not finish the instrument. To pick up where you left off, access the SkillsOne.com just as you did before, with your User ID, and you will be taken back to where you left off.