Conflict Handling Test: Which of the Five Styles Is Yours?

A widely used way of thinking about conflict, common in workplace training, rests on two concerns that every disagreement involves: how much you care about your own outcome, and how much you care about the other person's. Crossing the two gives five styles.

Competing is high concern for your outcome and low for theirs: you press your case to win. Accommodating is the reverse: you give way so the other person gets what they want. Avoiding is low on both, at least in what you do: you step around the disagreement or let it be decided for you. Compromising is moderate on both: you meet in the middle. Collaborating is high on both: you dig until you find an option that serves both sides.

None of the five is the right one. Each fits some situations and misfires in others. The useful question is which one you reach for by default, and whether it fits the disagreements you actually have.

Pressing your case. Saying plainly what you want, keeping your argument going, sticking with decisions under pushback, and not letting decisions you care about go ahead without you.

Making room for theirs. Asking what matters most to the other person, giving way when it matters more to them, checking they are all right with how things ended, and finding out what they actually wanted.

Digging for a third option. Laying out both sides' concerns before proposing a fix, pausing to get more information, and ending with an option neither of you started with, rather than letting deadlines decide.

Your style comes from the combination. High on the first and low on the second is competing. The reverse is accommodating. Middle on both is compromising. High on all three is collaborating. Low across the board is avoiding.

This test is about disagreements over what to do: where to go, how to split a task, which plan to back, how to spend money. Those happen at work and with friends as much as at home. It is not about how emotional arguments with a partner go, the raised voices, the silences and the making up afterwards. If that is your question, the conflict style test scores avoidance, escalation and repair in your arguments, and it is the main place on this site for finding your conflict resolution style in a relationship.

The conflict style test asks how costly your arguments are. The conflict coordinates test asks what your fights are about underneath: closeness, fairness or who decides. Am I a people pleaser? looks at giving way across your whole life, not only in disagreements. This page looks at your strategy when two sets of wants collide.

Many people first meet the five styles at work, in a training session or in the interview question about how you handle conflict. The same patterns apply there. A manager who competes by default gets fast decisions and quiet resentment. A colleague who accommodates is easy to work with and often overlooked. Teams that collaborate on big decisions and compromise on small ones tend to get the best of both. Your result applies at home and at work, though some people find they use one style in each, and that difference is worth noticing.

Learn the style you use least. Most people have one or two defaults and rarely touch the others. Practicing the missing one on low-stakes disagreements widens your options.

Match the style to the stakes. Collaborate on decisions that matter and that you will both live with. Compromise when time is short. Give way on purpose when the issue matters more to them. Hold your ground on safety and ethics.

Ask one question before you argue: "What matters most to you about this?" It moves almost any style one step toward collaboration.

And if a disagreement is coming up and you want to think it through first, the conflict script builder helps you plan what to say.