Billy And Nick's Dysfunctional Conflict

Billy and Nick (Vince Vaughn & Owen Wilson) are salesmen for a company which sells watches. They lose their jobs when the company folds. However, they refuse to be seen as obsolete so Billy convinces Nick to apply for an internship at Google. They find themselves surrounded by geniuses in which they need to compete with in order to receive the internship. Being unexperienced in the ‘technology’ world they seem to find difficulty keeping up with the rest. They are expected to complete a number of different tasks set out by the management. They are put into teams and whichever team receives the highest amount of points is the winner of the internship programme. They have an amazing ability that the other competitors don’t seem to have. They have …show more content…
Dysfunctional conflict is the type that hampers productivity, lowers employee’s morale and is usually the aggressive type. There are a few cases in the internship where one can see dysfunctional conflict. In the beginning, when the teams were chosen and Billy and Nick were put in with the so called ‘left overs’ everybody refused to work together. This dysfunctional conflict cost them a few challenges in which they failed at winning. Another example, Graham is constantly shouting at his teammates and demotivating them which causes them to not want to work together and displays inappropriate behaviour. Sometimes it is one person who has inner conflict. Billy has inner conflict and ends up demotivating himself after he fails at one challenge that he prepared for. He leaves the team thinking that they are better off without him. This shows dysfunctional conflict in the way that it lowers his morale and hampers his personal productivity. He is so distracted by his one mistake that he forgets the critical purpose of getting the internship. Functional stress, on the other hand, is the type to motivate and stimulate creativity. It helps the team/business realise their problem and address the problem. It is the non-aggressive type of conflict which, in turn, allows ideas to flow. It is seen, when Billy and Nick’s team start working together that Neha uses the conflict between her and her teammates as a motivation. She sees them as competition and always wants to be the one to get the answers first. The conflict amongst the different teams can also be seen as functional conflict as they base their motivation and productivity off the other teams as they are all competing for the internship. This stimulates hard work and effective work. Once again, it is seen that Billy has inner conflict, however, this inner conflict turned out to be functional conflict. He did not understand the