What is conflict management?

By: James M. Tobin, Edited by: Valerie Black

Last updated: May 7, 2025

Conflict commonly occurs in workplaces, and leaders need effective ways to manage and resolve it when it arises. Conflict can lead to productivity loss, low employee morale, and high turnover rates, so it's essential for managers to have strong conflict management skills.

Explore business-focused insights into conflict management and connect with opportunities to build your skills.

Who handles conflict management?

The department or person responsible for conflict management in a given organization depends on the organization's size and nature. For larger employers, human resources (HR) departments often play a leading role in conflict resolution. In smaller ones, leaders and managers typically assume this responsibility.

In either case, HR professionals, organizational leaders, and managers can work directly with the parties involved in a conflict. They generally use targeted strategies for mediating the conflict and working toward resolution.

HR teams can also work to prevent conflict by conducting surveys, monitoring internal dynamics, offering training, and assigning personnel strategically.

Organizational leaders and managers play important roles in establishing and advancing a positive workplace culture. As a leader, you can also develop your communication, active listening, and situational management skills to supplement your conflict management skills.

The five conflict management styles

The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Model is a widely accepted conflict management model that identifies five major approaches to conflict management and resolution. These strategies include:

Avoiding

The avoidance strategy advocates for deliberately retreating from a conflict or ignoring it outright. Conflict resolution experts note that this approach has limited utility in workplace settings, where ignoring conflicts can exacerbate the problem instead of solving it.

However, it can work in situations where the conflict is minor and the involved parties don't need to frequently interact to complete their work.

Accommodating

The accommodation strategy requires one party in the conflict to make concessions to resolve the conflict. While it can quickly solve conflicts, this strategy can sometimes be unproductive if a conflict-averse person uses it to avoid disagreement.

In workplaces, the accommodation strategy tends to work best if one party has a much stronger emotional investment in the issue than the other party.

Compromising

In the compromising strategy, all parties make concessions on certain aspects of their desired outcomes to resolve the issue. This strategy often takes a broader, longer-term view that may include agreements on how to handle future conflict.

Generally, the compromise solution works best when both parties have equal investment in their desired outcomes.

Competing

The competing strategy forgoes cooperative approaches. Instead, the involved parties engage in a "win-lose" scenario involving direct competition against one another.

Within organizations, the competing strategy has limited value as it places little importance on harmonious future relations between the involved parties. However, the model can be useful for external conflicts, such as those between competing businesses.

Collaborating

Collaborative approaches to conflict resolution seek to create "win-win" situations for everyone involved. Instead of making concessions or abandoning goals, this model advocates for cooperation in which the involved parties agree to work together to solve the underlying problem.

Experts widely believe that collaboration is the most effective way to manage workplace conflicts.