Values vs. Conflict Style: What the Research Does and Doesn't Show

Two people can score identically on a conflict style test and still handle the same argument in opposite ways, because the test only tells you the behavior, not the motive underneath it. This is what happens when you look at values and conflict style together instead of one at a time.

Quick Answer

Personal values (what you're measured on by an instrument like the PVQ-40) and conflict style (what you're measured on by an instrument like the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, or TKI) are assessed by two separate, unrelated tools. No published study has administered both instruments to the same sample and reported the correlation directly. Related research on social value orientation (a different construct) finds that people who care about others' outcomes behave more cooperatively in negotiation than people who care about their own outcomes or about beating the other side. That is suggestive for values and conflict style, but it is not a direct test, and it says nothing about what either person will do in any single argument.

Two Different Questions, One Person

A values assessment asks what you want out of life. A conflict style assessment asks what you do when getting what you want collides with someone else getting what they want. Those are different questions, and most personality content treats them as different chapters in the same book: read about your values on one page, read about your conflict style on another, and draw whatever connection you like.

The connection is worth drawing carefully, because it's not obvious and it's not arbitrary. Values are the goals a person is oriented toward. Conflict style is the strategy a person defaults to under interpersonal pressure. A values profile heavy on benevolence and universalism describes someone who cares, in the abstract, about other people's welfare. It doesn't automatically tell you whether that same person raises their voice, goes quiet, or looks for a middle ground the moment a real disagreement starts. That gap between what someone values and how someone actually behaves under stress is exactly where the two instruments need to be read together, not separately.

Where these sit in the 8-Layer Personality Map: Personal values are Layer 3. Conflict style is Layer 6. Values answer what matters to you; conflict style answers what you do when what matters to you runs into what matters to someone else. Reading them together shows whether your stated priorities and your default behavior actually line up, which is a different and more useful question than either layer answers alone. See the full 8-Layer Personality Map.

What Each Instrument Actually Measures

Personal Values: Schwartz's 10 Values and the PVQ-40

Shalom Schwartz's theory of basic human values identifies ten motivational goals (power, achievement, hedonism, stimulation, self-direction, universalism, benevolence, tradition, conformity, and security) that organize into two higher-order dimensions (Schwartz, 2012). The one that matters most here is self-transcendence versus self-enhancement: universalism and benevolence (concern for others' welfare) sit at one pole, power and achievement (personal success and dominance) sit at the other. The Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ-40) asks respondents to rate how similar they are to descriptions of people who hold each value (Schwartz, 2012).

Conflict Style: The Thomas-Kilmann Model

The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, developed by Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann (1974) on a framework proposed by Blake and Mouton (1964, as described in Johnson et al., 2014), scores five conflict styles (competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, accommodating) along two dimensions: assertiveness (how much you push for your own outcome) and cooperativeness (how much you work to satisfy the other person's outcome). Competing is high assertiveness, low cooperativeness. Collaborating is high on both. Accommodating is low assertiveness, high cooperativeness.

A terminology note: your own Layer 6 conflict-style result on Your True Self comes from the DUTCH (Dutch Test for Conflict Handling; De Dreu, Evers, Beersma, Kluwer, & Nauta, 2001), a Likert-scale instrument that measures five similar strategies, built on Dual Concern Theory (concern for self and concern for others) rather than on the TKI itself (De Dreu et al., 2001). The research in this article discusses the TKI and related conflict-style research; see our Conflict Resolution Styles guide for exactly which instrument produces your own results and how the two compare.

Notice the structural echo. Both instruments are built around a two-axis model of whose interests get prioritized. In Schwartz's circle, values with antagonistic motives sit opposite each other, and self-transcendence is contrasted with self-enhancement (Schwartz, 2012). The Thomas-Kilmann grid contrasts your own outcome with the other person's (Johnson et al., 2014). The two are not the same measure, but both involve the question of whose interests come first.

The Actual Research Connecting Them

Here's the honest part. If you search for a study that gave the PVQ-40 and the TKI to the same group of people and reported how values scores predicted conflict style scores, you won't find one. That specific crosswalk hasn't been run, and any article that claims otherwise is inventing a citation.

What exists instead is research on a related construct: social value orientation (SVO), which sorts people into prosocial, individualistic, or competitive orientations (Van Lange, 1999). SVO is not the PVQ-40, and the articles cited here do not show that the two measure the same thing. SVO has been tested against negotiation behavior:

In a study of 133 Dutch undergraduates, prosocial negotiators, compared with individualists and competitors, made lower demands, made more concessions, and ascribed more fairness and considerateness to the other person (De Dreu & Van Lange, 1995).
When preparing for negotiation, prosocial participants chose and recalled more cooperative than competitive heuristics, while competitors (and, in recall, individualists) did the reverse. Additional measures suggest prosocials favor cooperative heuristics because they see them as morally appropriate, and individualists and competitors favor competitive ones because they see them as effective (De Dreu & Boles, 1998).
A meta-analysis of 82 studies found a small to medium relationship between SVO and cooperation in social dilemmas (r = .30) (Balliet, Parks, & Joireman, 2009).

Research on cultural values and conflict handling is looser still. Gunkel, Schlaegel, and Taras (2016) surveyed 1,527 people from ten cultural clusters. They found that collectivism had a direct negative effect on preferring a dominating style, and that power distance had a direct positive effect on preferring avoiding and dominating styles. These are country-level values, not the individual values the PVQ-40 measures.

Put together: the specific PVQ-40-to-TKI link hasn't been tested. The SVO studies are consistent with the idea that caring about others' outcomes goes with more cooperative behavior in negotiation, but they use a different construct and, in the one study whose sample we checked, undergraduates. Treat the idea as a hypothesis, not a finding about these two instruments.

Four Patterns Worth Naming

These aren't clinical types or research findings. They're hypotheses about where a values profile and a conflict style might land together, drawn from the related research above. Plenty of people will break any of them.

High Universalism/Benevolence + Collaborating or Compromising

Someone whose top values are universalism and benevolence is oriented toward others' welfare as a goal. SVO research found prosocial negotiators chose more cooperative heuristics and made more concessions (De Dreu & Boles, 1998; De Dreu & Van Lange, 1995). One possible reading is that for this person, a one-sided win doesn't satisfy the underlying goal. That would mean they keep negotiating past the point where a competitive partner would have declared victory, because "we both got something" is the objective, not a fallback.

High Power/Achievement + Competing

Power and achievement values orient a person toward status, control, and measurable success. Individualistic and competitive SVO types recalled more competitive heuristics and saw them as effective (De Dreu & Boles, 1998), and made higher demands in negotiation (De Dreu & Van Lange, 1995). One possible reading is that this person treats a disagreement as something with a winner, so giving ground can register as a loss even in a relationship where nobody's keeping score.

High Security/Conformity/Tradition + Avoiding or Accommodating

Security, conformity, and tradition values share a conservation orientation: order, self-restriction, and preserving the past (Schwartz, 2012). We found no study that tests this profile against conflict style. The nearest evidence we opened is country-level: power distance went with a preference for avoiding and dominating styles (Gunkel et al., 2016). One possible reading is that for this person, the disruption of open conflict costs more than losing the specific argument, so they may not raise the issue, or drop it quickly. That is a guess, not a result.

High Self-Direction/Stimulation: The One That Doesn't Predict Cleanly

Self-direction and stimulation sit on the openness-to-change axis, not the self-transcendence/self-enhancement axis, and this is the honest gap in the pattern: nothing in the research cited above makes a prediction about conflict style for this profile. Anyone claiming a clean mapping for it is extrapolating past what the evidence supports.

When the Two Layers Don't Match

The more interesting case isn't the person whose values and conflict style line up. It's the one whose don't, because that mismatch is often more informative than either score alone.

Someone can score high on universalism and benevolence and still test as a strong competitor on the TKI. That's not a contradiction in the data. Schwartz notes that a value and a matching trait or behavior don't necessarily go together: people who value a goal don't always show the matching trait, and people who show a trait don't always value the matching goal (Schwartz, 2012). When your values and your conflict style point in different directions, it may be worth noticing the gap yourself rather than having it pointed out mid-argument.

The reverse mismatch shows up too. A person high in power and achievement values who tests as accommodating isn't necessarily hiding anything. One possibility is that achievement is pursued in a domain (career, a side project) that has nothing to do with the relationship where the accommodating pattern shows up. Both a values profile and a conflict style score are summaries across situations, and neither number shows how you behave in a specific one.

What This Can (and Can't) Tell You

What it can do: give you a mechanism, not just a label. "I'm a competitor" is a behavior description. "I hold power and achievement values, and related research on competitive orientations suggests a link to harder bargaining" is closer to an explanation, though an untested one. It can also give you a hypothesis about friction with a specific other person: a high-competing person paired with a high-accommodating person could leave one feeling outmaneuvered and the other unappreciated for the ground they keep giving. That is a possibility to talk through, not a documented pattern.

What it can't do: predict what either of you will do in any specific argument next Tuesday. It can't diagnose a "correct" pairing of values and conflict style, because none of the research cited here identifies one. It can't substitute for watching how someone actually behaves under real pressure. It also can't be read as a validated joint instrument: as covered above, the values-to-conflict-style link rests on adjacent research (social value orientation, cross-cultural conflict studies) rather than a study that measured both constructs, in these specific forms, in the same people. Treat the pattern as an untested hypothesis about why you might behave the way you do, not as a diagnosis of how you will.

Two other limits worth stating plainly. In most of the societies Schwartz studied, benevolence, universalism, and self-direction rank at the top on average and power, tradition, and stimulation at the bottom (Schwartz, 2012), so what matters is your priorities relative to your own other values, not the raw ratings. And both instruments are self-report: they capture how you describe yourself, not how you behave in a particular argument.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do personal values actually cause conflict style, or do they just happen to correlate?

Neither. No study has measured both together. Social value orientation studies find that prosocial orientations go with more cooperative negotiation behavior and more cooperation in social dilemmas (De Dreu & Van Lange, 1995; Balliet et al., 2009), but those studies show association and use a different construct. They cannot show that values cause conflict style.

Can two people with very different value profiles still handle conflict well together?

Yes, and this is worth stating directly because it's the part people misread as pessimistic. Nothing in the research cited here says a particular values mismatch dooms a relationship. Gottman (1993) followed 73 married couples and found stable marriages with quite different ways of handling conflict (validating, volatile, and avoiding), alongside unstable hostile ones. A competitor and an accommodator may do well if each notices the pattern: the competitor learns to notice when they're steamrolling, the accommodator learns to say what they actually want before resentment builds. That is a suggestion, not a research finding.

Does conflict style change depending on who I'm arguing with?

It may. The sources cited here don't measure how much conflict style varies across relationships, so this article can't say how much. Values and conflict style are different kinds of measures: Schwartz describes values as goals that go beyond specific situations (Schwartz, 2012), while a conflict style score summarizes how you say you handle conflict.

Is there a "best" combination of values and conflict style?

No. None of the research cited here identifies an optimal combination of values and conflict style.

How is this different from a general compatibility score?

A compatibility score usually aggregates several instruments into one number describing how well two people's profiles fit. This kind of analysis does the opposite: it isolates two specific layers and asks how they interact within one person, or between two specific people, in enough detail to explain a mechanism rather than produce a score. The tradeoff is that it only covers one pairing at a time instead of summarizing everything at once.

What to Do Next

Your values tell you what you're oriented toward. Your conflict style tells you what you actually do when that orientation meets someone else's. Neither one alone explains why a specific argument with a specific person keeps going the same way.

Take the Your True Self assessment to see your own values profile and conflict style side by side, or take the Couples Compatibility Assessment to see how your combination lines up against a partner's.

Citations

Balliet, D., Parks, C., & Joireman, J. (2009). Social value orientation and cooperation in social dilemmas: A meta-analysis. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 12(4), 533-547.

De Dreu, C. K. W., & Boles, T. L. (1998). Share and share alike or winner take all? The influence of social value orientation upon choice and recall of negotiation heuristics. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 76(3), 253-276.

De Dreu, C. K., Evers, A., Beersma, B., Kluwer, E. S., & Nauta, A. (2001). A theory-based measure of conflict management strategies in the workplace. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 22(6), 645-668.

De Dreu, C. K. W., & Van Lange, P. A. M. (1995). The impact of social value orientations on negotiator cognition and behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21(11), 1178-1188.

Gottman, J. M. (1993). The roles of conflict engagement, escalation, and avoidance in marital interaction: A longitudinal view of five types of couples. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 61(1), 6-15.

Gunkel, M., Schlaegel, C., & Taras, V. (2016). Cultural values, emotional intelligence, and conflict handling styles: A global study. Journal of World Business, 51(4), 568-585.

Johnson, C. A., Thompson, R. C., & Anderson, M. G. (2014). Technical brief for the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument: Global research project for translated TKI assessments. CPP, Inc.

Schwartz, S. H. (2012). An overview of the Schwartz theory of basic values. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1).

Thomas, K. W., & Kilmann, R. H. (1974). Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument. Xicom.

Van Lange, P. A. M. (1999). The pursuit of joint outcomes and equality in outcomes: An integrative model of social value orientation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(2), 337-349.

Part of the Understanding Your Personality guide. For the individual layers, see our guides on personal values and conflict resolution styles.

Your True Self is an informational and self-reflection tool. It is not a clinical assessment, psychological evaluation, or substitute for professional mental health services.