Recently, I have been addressing questions about bullying behavior in the workplace and how to use the TKI Conflict Model to help understand and better manage such difficult situations. In my consulting work, I have often had to counsel members and managers who were experienced as making life in the organization unbearable, dangerous, and fearful for others—usually by their extreme aggressiveness and sometimes by their extreme passivity. 

Downsizing, rightsizing, delayering, restructuring, revitalizing, and reengineering organizations—in short, organizational transformation—all focus on the systems and processes that exist primarily outside employees. Even with extensive efforts at training and development, the new skills and knowledge that employees typically acquire are mostly geared to solving technical and business problems—and adding value to customers and other key stakeholders.

Last year, I co-led as well as participated in a two-day workshop in England on making use of the TKI to help people broaden their sense of self (across all aspects of mind/body/spirit consciousness) by fully embodying all the systems and organizations that surround their life. 

Even though the collaborating mode sounds ideal to most people, it can only be used successfully under the right conditions. In fact, there are more conditions that affect the choice of collaborating than any other conflict mode.

by Ralph H. Kilmann
 

by Ralph H. Kilmann
 

Even if you choose to avoid for the right reasons, does it make a difference what you actually say to people just before you withdraw from the situation?

by Ralph H. Kilmann
 

Many organizations seem to have a strong avoiding culture, which can best be investigated with a specific change in TKI instructions. Instead of asking members to respond to the thirty items in general terms (which are the official TKI instructions), I provide these modified instructions: “IN THIS ORGANIZATION, when you find your wishes differing from those of another person, how do you usually respond?”