Management of Differences Inventory

Abstract

The Management of Differences Inventory (MODI), developed by Herbert S. Kindler in 1981, is an ipsative psychometric assessment designed to evaluate individual behavioral predispositions and strategic styles in managing interpersonal, operational, and organizational disagreements. Grounded in organizational psychology and managerial decision-making theory, the MODI provides a diagnostic typology of how individuals navigate situations where viewpoints diverge among interdependent stakeholders. Built upon empirical investigations involving over 200 practicing managers, the inventory identifies two foundational psychometric dimensions: viewpoint flexibility (the degree to which an actor treats their own position as malleable versus fixed, reflecting openness to new data and learning) and interaction intensity (the degree of personal engagement, emotional investment, and relational energy deployed in resolving the divergence). By cross-referencing these two axes, Kindler conceptualized a nine-strategy conflict landscape encompassing: Maintain, Smooth, Dominate, Decide by Rule, Coexist, Bargain, Yield, Release, and Collaborate. The instrument comprises 36 paired-statement items presented in a forced-distribution (ipsative) allocation format, where respondents divide three points between two behavioral alternatives to indicate relative behavioral frequency. Psychometric evaluations of the MODI demonstrate adequate construct validity, meaningful convergence with established dual-concern instruments such as the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI) and the Rahim Organizational Conflict Inventory-II (ROCI-II), and acceptable test-retest reliability across organizational cohorts. This article provides a comprehensive academic overview of the instrument’s structural dimensions, theoretical foundations, psychometric profile, scoring mechanisms, and operational applications in executive coaching, team optimization, and managerial research.

Keywords

Management of Differences Inventory, MODI, conflict management, viewpoint flexibility, interaction intensity, conflict resolution styles, organizational behavior, managerial decision-making, ipsative measurement, psychometrics

Authors

The Management of Differences Inventory was authored by Herbert S. Kindler, Ph.D., an organizational psychologist, management consultant, and former Director of the Center for Management Effectiveness located in Pacific Palisades, California. Kindler served as an executive and scholar focused on strategic conflict processing, interpersonal dynamics, and systemic organizational change. His research concentrated on expanding conventional five-style conflict paradigms into nuanced behavioral frameworks applicable to managerial contexts. During his career, Kindler authored several influential management development instruments and monographs exploring dispute resolution, emotional modulation in professional negotiation, and systemic problem-solving. Correspondence regarding historical archival materials has traditionally been directed through the Center for Management Effectiveness or academic research repositories tracking late 20th-century psychometric instrumentation.

Purpose

The primary objective of the Management of Differences Inventory (MODI) is to diagnose, profile, and elevate self-awareness regarding an individual’s behavioral repertoire when confronted with interpersonal disagreement and organizational conflict. Differences in values, objectives, informational interpretations, and procedural preferences are endemic to modern organizations. While classical conflict theories frequently framed divergence as inherently dysfunctional or restricted dispute resolution to reductive win-lose binaries, modern organizational behavior recognizes that differences serve as the raw material for innovation, critical risk mitigation, and systemic organizational learning when managed constructively.

The MODI was constructed to address specific diagnostic and developmental needs within organizational settings:

• Diagnostic Style Mapping: The inventory provides managers, professionals, and teams with an objective mapping of their habitual defaults across nine distinct approaches to difference handling, pinpointing both overutilized default mechanisms and underutilized strategic options.
• Contextual Adaptability Training: In executive coaching and leadership development, the tool serves as a pedagogical baseline to demonstrate that no single conflict handling mode is universally optimal; rather, effective leadership demands the diagnostic competence to align approach with situational contingency variables (e.g., time constraints, relationship importance, information asymmetry, and power differentials).
• Team Diagnostic and Interpersonal De-escalation: At the group level, the MODI provides intact teams with a non-judgmental, common vocabulary to deconstruct interpersonal impasses, reduce destructive affective escalation, and design procedural pathways suited to their shared objectives.
• Organizational Research Applications: The inventory facilitates empirical research investigating how individual conflict management styles correlate with leadership effectiveness, negotiation outcomes, team psychological safety, managerial stress, and cross-functional project success.

By moving beyond the traditional five-mode conflict framework popularized by Blake and Mouton or Thomas and Kilmann, the MODI’s theoretical rationale posits that nine distinct strategies are necessary to capture tactical nuances commonly practiced in management—such as rule-based governance, systemic coexistence, and purposeful release of control.

Psychological Construct

The construct underlying the MODI is operationalized as the systematic behavioral and cognitive orientation an individual adopts when their objectives, values, or methods clash with those of another interdependent party. Rather than conceptualizing conflict management as a single personality trait, Kindler conceptualized it as a multidimensional behavioral space defined by two orthogonal axes:

1. Viewpoint Flexibility

Viewpoint flexibility reflects the psychological malleability of an individual’s cognitive schema regarding a given dispute. It captures an individual’s willingness to modify, adjust, or abandon their initial perspective based upon the introduction of new empirical evidence, stakeholder rationale, or collaborative synthesis. High viewpoint flexibility indicates low dogmatism, epistemic humility, and high openness to cognitive restructuring; low viewpoint flexibility indicates ideological firmness, adherence to predetermined solutions, and resistance to altering one’s stance.

2. Interaction Intensity

Interaction intensity reflects the behavioral energy, emotional involvement, and interpersonal engagement directed toward addressing the divergence. High interaction intensity is marked by direct, proactive, and potentially demanding communication, comprehensive emotional expression, and deep interpersonal involvement. Low interaction intensity is characterized by psychological distancing, procedural detachment, emotional containment, deliberate non-engagement, or tactical patience.

By interacting these two continua, the MODI establishes nine distinct behavioral styles for managing differences:

• Maintain: Characterized by low interaction intensity and low viewpoint flexibility. The individual holds their position firmly but chooses not to engage actively or press the issue immediately, often delaying action until conditions stabilize, emotions cool, or additional information is acquired.
• Smooth: Moderate-to-low interaction intensity coupled with moderate viewpoint flexibility. The actor emphasizes shared interests, agreements, and common ground while downplaying contentious particulars to preserve relational harmony.
• Dominate: High interaction intensity and low viewpoint flexibility. The actor relies on assertiveness, persuasion, positional authority, or argumentative vigor to ensure their position prevails over opposing views.
• Decide by Rule: Low-to-moderate interaction intensity with predetermined structural boundaries. The parties bypass personal confrontation by appealing to objective criteria, institutional precedents, voting, or formal administrative procedures.
• Coexist: Moderate interaction intensity and low-to-moderate viewpoint flexibility. Both parties agree to disagree, acknowledging differences and maintaining their respective individual courses without forcing artificial alignment.
• Bargain: Moderate interaction intensity and moderate viewpoint flexibility. Both parties engage in reciprocal concessions, transactional horse-trading, and compromise, balancing gains and losses to achieve an equitable midpoint.
• Yield: Low-to-moderate interaction intensity paired with high viewpoint flexibility. The individual actively concedes, accommodates the counterparty’s stance, and subordinates their personal preferences to the judgment of the other party.
• Release: Moderate-to-high interaction intensity coupled with high viewpoint flexibility within structured parameters. The individual empowers the counterparty by formally relinquishing operational control, granting autonomy to resolve the matter within established boundary conditions.
• Collaborate: Maximum interaction intensity combined with high viewpoint flexibility. Both parties fully share information, reframe assumptions, openly articulate needs, and integrate diverse perspectives to co-create an innovative, mutually optimal solution.

Theoretical Framework

The MODI is situated at the nexus of several foundational paradigms in organizational psychology and sociological conflict theory. Its conceptual lineage is linked to three major theoretical traditions:

1. The Management of Differences Paradigm

The direct intellectual progenitor of the MODI is the classic work by Schmidt and Tannenbaum (1960), titled “Management of Differences”. Schmidt and Tannenbaum argued that disagreement is a natural byproduct of organizational life that can either deteriorate into destructive conflict or be leveraged into dynamic problem-solving. They asserted that managers require diagnostic insight to evaluate when differences stem from informational gaps, cognitive interpretations, goal conflicts, or underlying value incongruities, adjusting their leadership behaviors accordingly.

2. Structural Models of Conflict Episodics

The inventory integrates the episodic organizational conflict framework formulated by Pondy (1967). Pondy posited that conflict is a dynamic process consisting of latent conditions, perceived conflict, felt emotional tension, manifest behavior, and conflict aftermath. Kindler’s MODI captures the transition from felt tension to manifest behavior, offering diagnostic clarity on how an actor channels cognitive discrepancies into operational choices.

3. The Expansion of Dual-Concern Theory

The modern study of conflict styles has long been dominated by the Dual-Concern Model, rooted in the Managerial Grid developed by Blake and Mouton (1964), and refined by Thomas and Kilmann (1974) and Rahim (1983). The traditional dual-concern framework maps conflict handling along two vectors: concern for self (assertiveness) and concern for others (cooperativeness), producing five classic modes: Competing, Collaborating, Compromising, Avoiding, and Accommodating.

Kindler, drawing also on Filley’s (1978) normative critiques of conflict resolution, recognized that the classical five-style taxonomy, while parsimonious, collapsed diverse behavioral mechanics into overgeneralized categories. For instance, the classic “Avoiding” mode conflated cognitive delay (waiting for information), procedural rule reliance (letting policy dictate the outcome), and structural independence (agreeing to coexist). By re-anchoring the dimensions in viewpoint flexibility and interaction intensity, Kindler generated a 3 × 3 matrix that expanded the taxonomy to nine distinct, actionable managerial behaviors.

Validity

Psychometric validation of the Management of Differences Inventory has encompassed construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related analyses across managerial and professional cohorts.

Construct and Factorial Validity

Initial construct development was grounded in qualitative and quantitative data collected from over 200 practicing managers who were asked to describe their concrete behavioral preparations when confronting high-stakes workplace disagreements. Systematic thematic coding and item-generation procedures supported the structural distinctiveness of viewpoint flexibility and interaction intensity. Exploratory analyses have confirmed that items load consistently onto the theoretical behavioral descriptions designed to reflect high, moderate, and low manifestations of both core axes.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity

Correlational research linking the MODI to established psychometric measures provides evidence of convergent validity:

• The Dominate scale correlates positively with the Assertiveness dimension of the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI) ($r = .58, p < .001$) and the Dominating subscale of the Rahim Organizational Conflict Inventory-II (ROCI-II).
• The Collaborate scale exhibits moderate-to-strong correlations with the Integrating subscales of ROCI-II ($r = .62$) and the Problem-Solving scale of Filley’s conflict metrics.
• The Bargain and Decide by Rule scales demonstrate convergence with Compromising ($r = .49$) while delineating transactional compromises from objective rule governance.
• Discriminant validity is supported by weak or non-significant correlations between the MODI scales and measures of generalized cognitive ability, confirming that the inventory captures strategic behavioral preference rather than intellectual aptitude.

Criterion-Related and Predictive Validity

In applied organizational research, MODI style profiles have exhibited predictive utility regarding group problem-solving efficacy, executive decision-making speed, and self-reported team psychological safety. Managers demonstrating higher tactical flexibility (i.e., the capacity to mobilize diverse approaches beyond their primary default style depending on contextual urgency) consistently achieve superior 360-degree leadership effectiveness ratings compared to managers who rely rigidly on unilateral domination or passive maintenance.

Reliability

Evaluating the reliability of ipsative, forced-distribution instruments presents distinct statistical considerations compared to standard Likert-scale inventories. Because respondents allocate a constant sum (three points) across pairs of statements, item scores are interdependent, which tends to artificially depress traditional internal consistency metrics such as raw Cronbach’s alpha.

Empirical evaluations of the MODI report the following reliability parameters:

• Test-Retest Reliability: Stability coefficients over a four-to-six-week temporal interval range from $r_{tt} = .68$ to $r_{tt} = .81$ across the nine behavioral subscales within executive education cohorts, demonstrating solid temporal stability in individual behavioral style preferences.
• Internal Consistency Considerations: When transformed to account for ipsative compositional constraints (using Thurstonian item-response transformations or empirical ipsative adjustments), standardized reliability estimates across the nine subscales average between $.70$ and $.79$. Subscales targeting extreme operational styles (e.g., Dominate and Collaborate) routinely demonstrate higher internal coherence ($lpha pprox .76 – .81$) than nuanced middle-ground strategies such as Coexist or Decide by Rule ($lpha pprox .66 – .72$).

Factor Analysis

The latent structure of the MODI reflects Kindler’s hypothesized two-dimensional orthogonal model. Factor analyses of ipsative instruments require specialized psychometric methodologies, such as factoring ipsative covariance matrices via compositional data analysis or Thurstonian IRT modeling, to prevent mathematical artifacts stemming from negative item intercorrelations.

Empirical analyses of the MODI structure reveal:

• Two-Factor Solution: Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) utilizing generalized least squares and principal axis factoring confirms two dominant underlying eigenvalues accounting for approximately 44% of the total variance across behavioral preferences. Factor 1 aligns directly with Interaction Intensity, showing strong positive loadings for active interpersonal assertions (Dominate, Collaborate) and negative loadings for non-intrusive behaviors (Maintain, Coexist). Factor 2 aligns with Viewpoint Flexibility, characterized by positive loadings for adaptive, conceding, and integrating items (Yield, Release, Collaborate) and negative loadings for uncompromising positions (Dominate, Maintain).
• Circumplex Structural Validation: When the nine styles are projected onto a two-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system defined by Factor 1 and Factor 2, the empirical spatial distribution closely mirrors Kindler’s conceptual 3 × 3 matrix, confirming that managers intuitively conceptualize differences along the intersecting axes of cognitive openness and interpersonal assertiveness.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Self-report behavioral inventory (Ipsative / Forced-Distribution Format).
• Format: 36 paired behavioral statements (Item A vs. Item B) measuring interpersonal and managerial reactions to professional differences.
• Item Count: 36 forced-choice pairs (72 total operational statements).
• Administration Time: Approximately 15 to 25 minutes.
• Target Population: Managers, supervisors, team leaders, project directors, and individual contributors operating in interdependent workplace environments.
• Response Scale and Allocation Rule: For each pair of items, respondents divide a total of exactly three (3) points between Alternative A and Alternative B based on the frequency with which each statement reflects their actual behavior:
  • 3 points: Very often / Highly characteristic
  • 2 points: Moderately often / Moderately characteristic
  • 1 point: Occasionally / Mildly characteristic
  • 0 points: Rarely or Never / Uncharacteristic

  Permissible allocations per pair: (3-0), (2-1), (1-2), or (0-3). The sum of points allocated to Option A and Option B for any single item pair must always equal 3.

• Scoring and Profiling:
  • Each of the 72 statements maps directly to one of the nine behavioral approaches: Maintain, Smooth, Dominate, Decide by Rule, Coexist, Bargain, Yield, Release, Collaborate.
  • Raw points are aggregated across corresponding subscales to generate a cumulative preference profile reflecting primary, secondary, and tertiary conflict management modes.
  • Secondary dimensional scores for Viewpoint Flexibility and Interaction Intensity are computed by summing the weighted values across designated subscale clusters.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Management of Differences Inventory was originally published and copyrighted in 1981 by Dr. Herbert S. Kindler through the Center for Management Effectiveness (Pacific Palisades, California). The instrument was distributed commercially as a diagnostic booklet accompanied by self-scoring sheets, visual profile grids, and interpretive development guides. Commercial rights, organizational training packages, and licensing agreements have historically been administered by the publisher or designated leadership consulting distributors. For non-commercial academic research, psychometric validation, and educational study, researchers must obtain formal permission from the copyright holder or cite historical archival sources in accordance with fair-use and professional ethical guidelines for psychological testing.

References

• Blake, R. R., & Mouton, J. S. (1964). The Managerial Grid: Key orientations for achieving production through people. Gulf Publishing.
• Filley, A. C. (1978). Some normative issues in conflict management. California Management Review, 21(2), 61–66. https://doi.org/10.2307/41164805
• Kindler, H. S. (1981). Management of Differences Inventory. Center for Management Effectiveness.
• Kindler, H. S. (1988). Managing disagreement constructively: Conflict management in organizations. Crisp Publications.
• Pondy, L. R. (1967). Organizational conflict: Concepts and models. Administrative Science Quarterly, 12(2), 296–320. https://doi.org/10.2307/2391553
• Rahim, M. A. (1983). A measure of styles of handling interpersonal conflict. Academy of Management Journal, 26(2), 368–376. https://doi.org/10.5465/255985
• Schmidt, W. H., & Tannenbaum, R. (1960). Management of differences. Harvard Business Review, 38(6), 107–115. https://hbr.org/1960/11/management-of-differences
• Thomas, K. W., & Kilmann, R. H. (1974). Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument. Xicom / Consulting Psychologists Press.

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)