A conflict style quiz for how you handle disagreement

This conflict style quiz shows how you tend to respond when you and someone else want different things. It scores you on five styles: competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding and accommodating. It takes about four minutes, is free to take and needs no sign-up.

Please note that Conflict Style uses Selfcarta's own questions, which are not yet independently validated. It is a way of seeing your habits more clearly, not a measure of how good you are at conflict.

What the quiz measures

Most of us use all five styles at some point. The quiz looks at which ones you tend to reach for first.

• Competing: you tend to hold your position and push for it. This is useful when something has to be decided quickly, or when a principle is at stake.
• Collaborating: you tend to look for an answer that fully works for both of you. This is useful when the issue and the relationship both matter, and you have the time.
• Compromising: you tend to look for a fair middle. This is useful when you need something workable and you can both give a little.
• Avoiding: you tend to step back or wait. This is useful when things are heated, or when the issue is small.
• Accommodating: you tend to give way to keep the peace. This is useful when it matters more to the other person, or when you are simply wrong.

Each one also has a watch-out. Competing may leave people feeling unheard. Avoiding can let small problems grow. Accommodating may mean your needs slowly disappear. Knowing your first instinct gives you the chance to choose something else when you need to.

The science behind it

The idea of a handful of conflict styles has a long history in management research. Afzalur Rahim's 1983 paper built five scales for measuring styles of handling interpersonal conflict. Carsten De Dreu and colleagues later developed a workplace measure of conflict management strategies, including problem solving, forcing, yielding, avoiding and compromising.

Their work holds an interesting lesson. In a negotiation study, self-reports, reports from the other party and observer ratings substantially agreed for problem solving, forcing and yielding, but not for avoiding. Avoiding may simply be harder for others to read. If you tend to step back, the person across from you might not see it the way you do.

Rahim also argues that good conflict management is partly about using an appropriate style for the situation. So the point of knowing your style isn't to be stuck with it.

Research on teams adds another useful distinction. A meta-analysis of 116 studies by Frank de Wit and colleagues found stable negative links between relationship conflict and group outcomes, while task conflict showed no strong negative link overall. Disagreeing about the work is one thing. Letting it become personal is another.

Our five styles use these general ideas, but our questions are original. They don't come from any published instrument, and they have not been independently validated. We don't claim accuracy figures for this quiz.

What you can do with your result

Try a small experiment the next time a disagreement comes up.

• If you lean competing: ask one real question before making your case.
• If you lean collaborating: check whether this issue deserves the time you are giving it.
• If you lean compromising: ask whether splitting the difference misses a better answer.
• If you lean avoiding: say "I need a little time, can we talk about this tomorrow?", then do it.
• If you lean accommodating: name one thing you would actually like, even if you still decide to let it go.

For couples, our guide to personality insights in a relationship can help. At work, try building a team with different work styles.

How you look from the other side

Your style can feel very different from the inside. What you see as staying calm, someone else might see as shutting down. With Second Sight, people who know you can answer a 10-item version of the Conflict Style Expedition about you. Friends, family and co-workers stay anonymous, and they are shown only as averages with at least two others. The Partner circle is a named, one-to-one comparison, and your partner is told that before they start.