Values vs. Conflict Style: What Actually Predicts How You Fight

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. But a large adjacent literature on social value orientation and cross-cultural conflict research supports a real pattern: people whose values emphasize concern for others (self-transcendence) lean toward collaborating and compromising, while people whose values emphasize personal success and control (self-enhancement) lean toward competing. The effect is moderate, not deterministic, 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, 1992). 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), the instrument most commonly used to measure this today, asks respondents to rate how similar they are to descriptions of people who hold each value, a design validated across dozens of countries (Schwartz et al., 2001).

Conflict Style: The Thomas-Kilmann Model

The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, developed by Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann (1974), 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 built on this same five-style, two-dimension framework rather than the original forced-choice TKI itself. The research in this article discusses the TKI and the broader conflict-style literature it anchors; 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. Schwartz built his circle around the tension between self-transcendence and self-enhancement because that tension is, definitionally, a conflict of motives. Thomas and Kilmann built their grid around the tension between your outcome and the other person's outcome because that's what a disagreement is. The instruments were developed decades apart for different purposes, but they're both mapping the same underlying question: when your interests and someone else's diverge, who wins?

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 a substantial, real literature on a closely related construct: social value orientation (SVO), which sorts people into prosocial, individualistic, or competitive orientations using behavioral economic games rather than a values questionnaire (Van Lange, 1999). SVO isn't the same instrument as the PVQ-40, but it measures essentially the same motivational dimension Schwartz calls self-transcendence versus self-enhancement, and it has been tested directly against conflict and negotiation behavior many times over:

Prosocially oriented negotiators make more concessions, ascribe more fairness to their counterparts, and use lower demand levels than individualistic or competitive negotiators (De Dreu & Van Lange, 1995).
When preparing for negotiation, prosocial participants recall cooperative strategies more readily and individualists and competitors recall competitive strategies more readily; prosocial negotiators favor cooperative tactics because they see them as morally appropriate, while individualists and competitors favor competitive tactics because they see them as more effective (De Dreu & Boles, 1998).
Across 82 studies, SVO reliably predicts cooperative versus self-interested choices in social dilemmas, with a moderate effect size (Balliet, Parks, & Joireman, 2009).

A second, separate literature looks at values at the cultural rather than individual level and ties them directly to conflict-handling style, sometimes using instruments in the same family as the TKI. Individuals higher in vertical individualism (a values orientation centered on personal achievement and status) show a stronger pull toward forcing/competing styles, while collectivist orientations pull toward accommodating and collaborating (Kaushal & Kwantes, 2006). A meta-analysis across dozens of studies found the same individualism-collectivism pattern holds after accounting for gender and organizational role (Holt & DeVore, 2005), and a ten-country dataset linking cultural values to conflict handling style replicated it again at a global scale (Gunkel, Schlaegel, & Taras, 2016).

Put together: the specific PVQ-40-to-TKI link hasn't been tested, but the underlying mechanism (values that prioritize others' welfare pulling toward cooperative conflict behavior, values that prioritize personal success pulling toward competitive conflict behavior) is well supported by adjacent, methodologically different research using overlapping constructs. That's a real pattern worth taking seriously. It is not the same as a validated, direct correlation between these two specific instruments, and the difference matters for how much weight you put on it.

Four Patterns Worth Naming

These aren't clinical types. They're where a values profile and a conflict style commonly land together, based on the mechanism above, with the caveat built in each time that plenty of people break the pattern.

High Universalism/Benevolence + Collaborating or Compromising

Someone whose top values are universalism and benevolence is oriented toward others' welfare as a goal. The SVO research suggests this shows up behaviorally as a preference for solutions that work for both people, not because they're conflict-averse but because a one-sided win doesn't satisfy the underlying goal. In practice: this person keeps negotiating past the point where a competitive partner would have declared victory or walked away, because "we both got something" is the actual 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 recall and prefer competitive heuristics, rate them as more effective, and use higher demand levels in negotiation (De Dreu & Boles, 1998). In practice: this person treats a disagreement as something with a winner, and giving ground can register less as generosity and more as a loss, even in a relationship where nobody's actually keeping score.

High Security/Conformity/Tradition + Avoiding or Accommodating

Security, conformity, and tradition values share a conservation orientation: preserving stability, meeting expectations, avoiding disruption. Cross-cultural conflict research consistently finds collectivist, harmony-oriented value profiles associated with accommodating and avoiding styles (Kaushal & Kwantes, 2006; Holt & DeVore, 2005). In practice: for this person, the disruption of open conflict can feel like a bigger cost than losing the specific argument, so the path of least resistance is not raising the issue, or dropping it quickly once it's raised.

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 SVO or cross-cultural literature cited above makes a clean prediction about conflict style for this profile. Someone high in self-direction might collaborate energetically on a problem that engages their autonomy and curiosity, then avoid entirely a dispute they find boring or beneath their interest. The values matter to how they engage, but not in a way that maps to one TKI style. If a two-instrument article claims otherwise for this profile, it's 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, believe fairness and others' welfare matter to them, and still test as a strong competitor on the TKI. That's not a contradiction in the data. It usually means the value operates at the level of belief and identity ("I care about fairness") while the behavior under real interpersonal pressure runs on a different track, shaped by family conflict patterns, professional training, or plain habit. The values assessment tells you what this person would say they want a conflict to look like. The conflict style assessment tells you what they'll actually do. When those two answers diverge, the honest read is: this person's stated priorities and their default behavior aren't currently aligned, and it may be worth their while to notice that gap themselves rather than have 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 secretly ambitious and passive-aggressive. More often, achievement is being pursued in a domain (career, a side project, a competitive hobby) that has nothing to do with the relationship where the accommodating pattern shows up. Values don't apply uniformly across every relationship and context, and conflict style, per the TKI's own documentation, shifts by relationship and stakes as well. A single values profile and a single conflict style score are both averages across situations that vary more than either number lets on.

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 the research suggests that motivational profile is associated with a competing conflict style" is closer to an explanation, and explanations are more useful than labels for actually changing a pattern you don't like. It also gives you a way to predict friction with a specific other person before it happens: a high self-enhancement, high-competing profile paired with a high self-transcendence, high-accommodating profile is a well-documented recipe for one person feeling constantly outmaneuvered and the other feeling constantly unappreciated for the ground they keep giving.

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 no such thing exists in the research; every combination shows up in functioning relationships and dysfunctional ones. It can't substitute for watching how someone actually behaves under real pressure, which remains the most reliable information you'll ever get, more reliable than any questionnaire. And it 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 a well-supported hypothesis about why you might behave the way you do, not as a diagnosis of how you will.

Two other limits worth stating plainly. Self-report values measures are vulnerable to social desirability: almost everyone rates benevolence and universalism as somewhat important to them, because almost nobody wants to describe themselves as indifferent to others' welfare, which compresses the very differences the instrument is trying to detect. And conflict style, measured by forced-choice instruments like the TKI, captures a general default, not a fixed trait; the same person can test as an avoider at work and a competitor at home, because context changes which style feels available and appropriate.

Frequently Asked Questions

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

The research supports correlation and a plausible mechanism, not proven causation. Social value orientation studies show prosocial and proself orientations reliably predict cooperative versus competitive negotiation behavior (De Dreu & Van Lange, 1995; Balliet et al., 2009), which is consistent with values causing conflict style. But values, personality, upbringing, and conflict style could all be shaped by a common underlying factor rather than values directly producing the behavior. No study has isolated values as the sole cause.

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. Values compatibility and conflict style compatibility are both weaker predictors of relationship success than how a couple actually communicates during disagreement (Gottman & Silver, 1999). A self-enhancement-heavy competitor and a self-transcendence-heavy accommodator can build a durable, satisfying relationship if they both understand the pattern and adjust: the competitor learns to notice when they're steamrolling, the accommodator learns to say what they actually want before resentment builds.

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

Yes. The TKI itself is explicit that people shift styles by relationship and stakes; someone might default to competing with a sibling and avoiding with a boss. Values are somewhat more stable across contexts than conflict style is, which is part of why the two instruments capture different things: values describe a relatively consistent orientation, conflict style describes a behavior that's more responsive to the specific relationship and situation.

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

No. Every value profile pairs with every conflict style somewhere in the population, and none of the research cited here identifies an optimal combination. What the research does support is that flexibility (the capacity to shift conflict style when your default isn't serving the situation) predicts better outcomes than any fixed style, regardless of what values sit underneath it.

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., & Silver, N. (1999). The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Harmony Books.

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.

Holt, J. L., & DeVore, C. J. (2005). Culture, gender, organizational role, and styles of conflict resolution: A meta-analysis. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 29(2), 165-196.

Kaushal, R., & Kwantes, C. T. (2006). The role of culture and personality in choice of conflict management strategy. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 30(5), 579-603.

Schwartz, S. H. (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 25, pp. 1-65). Academic Press.

Schwartz, S. H., Melech, G., Lehmann, A., Burgess, S., Harris, M., & Owens, V. (2001). Extending the cross-cultural validity of the theory of basic human values with a different method of measurement. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 32(5), 519-542.

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.