Conflict management

How can we help you reach better resolutions?

Change your approach to conflict and you can change the outcome

In business, human dynamics is rarely considered a top priority. Katy Lyne explains why this is a serious problem.

Betsy Kendall explores the different conflict styles and how they can be used most effectively. 

Leaders are quick, decisive, and know what they want; they aren’t afraid to make unpopular decisions and they can be fiercely competitive. This might be a somewhat old-fashioned view of leadership, but new research by OPP suggests there is more than a grain of truth here.

Visits to our Personality Matters blog were at an all-time high in 2014, and we covered a wide range of topics in our weekly posts. Over the last 12 months we've talked about the best MBTI-based books and the various resources available for L&D teams. We’ve promoted Movember, and we’ve commented on the Paul Flowers furore. We've also continued to thrive as thought leaders in a diverse range of workplace psychology issues, from recruitment and assessment centres to polarity management. But what are the top five posts that readers have returned to again and again?

In the second of our blog posts looking at 20 invaluable books about MBTI^® and type, we review another ten titles that have impressed MBTI practitioners or been a key support in their work with the MBTI assessment. As with the first batch, the books featured here are listed in no particular order, and comments are from individual reviewers who responded to our request for reviews on the Linked In group OPP Qualified Professionals.

In Act 1 of my blog posts marking 40 years of the TKI, I described the circumstances surrounding the development of the instrument. In this continuation of the story I’ll explain how ongoing research and validation enabled it to become the world’s best-selling conflict management tool.

Understanding personality type helps us see how our minds are wired - how we like to get energised, take in information, make decisions, and orient ourselves to the outer world. Understanding interpersonal needs gives us insight into another aspect of our personality - what motivates our behaviour in regard to how much interaction we want with others.

"While I don’t recall if there was a single moment, an epiphany of sorts, at some point Ken and I must’ve said out loud: 'Let’s develop a new instrument to measure the five conflict-handling modes'..." Ralph Kilmann recalls the origins of the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument in the first of two blog posts celebrating 40 years of the TKI.