Relate Cop Movies to Workplace Conflict
There
are tons of cop movies. Some of them talk about the same thing: two partners paired
up reluctantly, but end up helping each other and finish the mission. Such as Lethal
Weapon (1987), Point Break (1991), Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), Rush Hour
(1998), Training Day (2001), Hot Fuzz (2007), 21 Jump Street (2012), 22 Jump
Street (2014), Zootopia (2016) and even the incoming movie, Bright (2017). I
don’t know whether people get tired of watching same plots in different cop
movies again and again, at least I am still love watching cop movies.
In
those movies, most plots are like a disciplined officer needs to cooperate with
another officer or civilian who is careless of rules. In the beginning, you can
feel the tension between those two people since they are used to tackle tasks
using their old methods. Conflicts occur often. However, their new challenge proves
that old ways doesn’t work and they both need to learn something from their
partner. To elaborate my illustrations, I’ll take Zootopia (2016), one of my favorite
animation, as example.
Zootopia,
a fictional city in the movie, where all animals live together in harmony. In
other words, in Zootopia, predators and preys have equal rights to do whatever
they want to do. Judy Hopps is a bunny who dreamed to become a police officers
since she was a child. When she finally conquers every challenges and graduates
from the police academy, she is assigned to the heart of Zootopia, precinct one,
city center. Unfortunately, things do not go with what she expected. She wants
to fight crimes and makes the world a better place; the chief yet only lets her
do parking duty. As the number of missing animals in Zootopia soars up, Judy argues
with the chief trying to get the chance to solve the case. She finally makes
the chief consent, but with a 48 hours deadline to solve the case, or she has to
resign. Desperately, Judy threats a citizen, Nick, for help. Nick is a fox who
lives and runs a small business in Zootopia for years, he knows many people,
which means Judy can use Nick’s networking to solve the case. Nick has no
choice but to offer his assistance or he will be arrested for felony tax
evasion.
In
the beginning of Judy and Nick’s cooperation, there are some conflicts. Nick
only wants to offer minimum helps and get rid of Judy. In Nick’s situation, he
thinks he is just a citizen who tries hard to make a living in Zootopia,
helping police officers is definitely not one of his duties. Judy, however, wants
to do as much as she can to help people but does not really care about what
Nick needs. After spending time working together, Judy start realizing that Nick
isn’t the kind of sly foxes that people used to think. Nick acts unfriendly is
because of his childhood trauma. So does Nick start realizing what Judy really
wants. As a bunny and also the first “prey” police officer, Judy is eager to prove
herself and fulfill her duties to make the world a better place.
Things
get simpler once Judy and Nick both realize what each other wants. They then
focus on the case and find out who kidnapped 14 missed animals. Yet the movie
does not end here, the closer that Judy and Nick get to the truth, they find
out some eviler thing is behind the simple kidnap. And I am not going to spoil
my readers. The point I am trying to say is, sometimes it is hard to get along
with people you don’t fully understand, which may cause misunderstandings and
conflicts. In the work places, employees are usually work with people they don’t
really know, and things get nasty when they find out their coworkers are not
the kind of people they like. Most of time, people don’t even bother to take
time to understand what others are thinking. Unlike what I’ve seen in most of
cop movies, two partners endanger their life to solve missions and they can
only rely on each other. They have no choice but to communicate with their
partners and find out what their partner wants.
Few
points I want to point out in comparison with normal office workers and police
officers. First, jobs that police officers do are much danger than what office
workers do. I believe that is one of the reasons that cops need to solve their
conflicts as fast as possible so they can focus on the mission. Unlike police
officers, office workers do not need to confront matters of life and death, the
worst consequence of failing to cooperate and complete the job is, probably,
get fired. For polices, losing life is a big stake that they cannot afford to
lose. However, it is not a big deal for office workers to lose a job, which
makes them less motivated to solve conflicts seriously. My belief is that, one
way to solve conflicts in work place is to increase the stack. If the price of having
conflicts and losing jobs is too expensive, workers might put more effort on
communicating with each other and find out what is the win-win situation. Such
as higher the rewards of finishing a mission, which makes losing jobs an
expensive choice that the worker won’t want to choose. In economic terms,
higher the opportunity cost of losing jobs.
My
second point is, most of time polices’ missions are not only related to themselves
but also citizens. Police officers need to make altruistic choices to benefit
as more citizens as they can. For example, stop a terror attack can save
hundred lives, then cops will do whatever they can do to stop it. They do not
have time to argue with each other. In the contrary, office workers’ choices
are more about themselves, higher their own benefit is the priority. If a
worker finds out that his project partner is abominated, the first thing he
wants to do is not talking to his partner but trying to get rid of the partner.
That is the point where conflicts occur. Thus, my second thought of how to
solve conflicts in workplaces is to make jobs “noble.” Such as set strict
workplaces ethics or set a goal which can improve human beings living standards.
By doing so, workers realize that their behaviors influence not only themselves
but others, and act altruistically is the best way to make everyone happy. In
other words, a way which triggers peoples’ altruistic personality can solve
conflicts since they will think of others before themselves.
Perhaps it is funny, but I watched none of the movies that you've listed in the first paragraph. So I have very little context to on. Way back when, I did watch cop movies. Serpico is one of them - true to life and a very poignant film. Prince of the City is another true to life movie. They both concern the cops who work in narcotics. It is possible to make money on the side - be corrupt - and compromise one's own ethics in that situation. This is the sort of issue that many other people don't really confront, because the temptations aren't there in the same way. More recently, I watched Seven, which is an interesting movie, though it is entirely fiction. .
ReplyDeleteThat said, I thought more of your post was about the movies and the particular one you focused on, Zootopia, than on conflict in the workplace. The exception is your paragraph that is third from the bottom, which is where you draw the lesson from the story. That was a good paragraph. I wish you had written more about that and about the issue of learning to understand one's co-workers. Indeed, that could have been the bulk of the essay.
You did try to draw a second lesson in the last paragraph, relating conflict to altruism. You could have made the point sharper, perhaps by distinguishing altruism with co-workers from altruism with clients/customers. Of course, if there is altruism with co-workers and that is genuine, there likely won't be serious conflict (though there still can be disagreements). On the other hand, altruism with clients might actually cause conflict at work. We will consider a version of this in the next post, which is about "the triangle principal-agent" problem. The employee may be quite generous with the client, but the boss may not be happy with that because the employee isn't generating enough revenue from other clients. That is the tension.
This is one of my favorite posts of yours thus far. I really liked your ability to make the connections from Zootopia, which is a great movie, to these concepts. Additionally, your focus on police officers is something that I connect with. I'll give a bit of background and then my take on some of the aspects that affect the conflict / resolution and stake aspects that you brought up in your post.
ReplyDeleteMy father is a police officer, one who has been on the force for coming up on 27 years. He is currently the most senior Lieutenant at his department, so he is the fourth person in the leadership hierarchy that they have in place. Over the year, he has gone from a police officer on the road, to a detective, to a sergeant of both a road shift and the detective bureau, and now his current role. Over the time, challenges that he faced in terms of parts of his job varied. On the road, it was similar to what you mentioned regarding the potential affects to citizens. Within the detective bureau, as this was the backside work of solving cases, it was more office work but focused within the community to solve the case, the stakes being that a case would go unsolved with a potential criminal remaining on the streets. In his current supervisory role, he does not have direct citizen contact as frequently as he used to, but duties are more managerial in nature.
I would draw a parallel to some of the aspects you drew regarding office worker conflicts and police officer conflicts, that while the situational aspects of the conflicts are different, there are similar categories of conflicts. There are internal conflicts and external conflicts. In an office, external conflicts may not be as frequent or high stakes, but they still do exist. Additionally, there are internal conflicts within police departments. I find these connections interesting and hope that this background gives some food for thought.