Developing a Forced-Choice Measure of Conflict-Handling Behavior: The "Mode" Instrument

TLDR

The study develops a new measure of five conflict‑handling modes designed to reduce social desirability bias. The authors created the MODE instrument, a forced‑choice measure of five conflict‑handling modes, and examined its substantive and structural validity. The MODE instrument markedly lowers social desirability bias relative to other measures, and preliminary external‑validity data are promising but warrant further study.

Abstract

This paper describes the rationale and development of a new measure of five interpersonal conflict-handling modes (competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, and accommodating), which attempts to control for the social desirability response bias. The instrument is entitled: "Management-of-Differences Exercise," or the MODE instrument. The results of this study indicate that the new instrument significantly reduces the social desirability bias for overall population tendencies in comparison to three other conflict behavior instruments, although all four instruments may still be susceptible to some individual tendencies in this response bias. This study also investigated other aspects of substantive validity and structural validity. Lastly, this paper presented emerging evidence on external validity, which, while encouraging, suggests the need for continuing research efforts to investigate this aspect of validity for the new MODE instrument.