Games At Work: How to Recognize and Reduce Office Politics

As long as people have worked together, they have engaged in political games. Motivated by short-term gains—promotions, funding for a project, budget increases, status with the boss—people misuse their time and energy. Today, when many organizations are fighting for their lives and scarce resources there is increased stress and anxiety, and employees are engaging in games more intensely than ever before. Organizational experts Mauricio Goldstein and Philip Read argue that office games—those manipulative behaviors that distract employees from achieving their mission—are both conscious and unconscious.

They can and should be effectively minimized. In Games at Work, the authors offer tools to diagnose the most common games that people play and outline a three-step process to effectively deal with them. Some of the games they explore include:

• Gotcha: identifying and communicating others’ mistakes in an effort to win points from higher-ups
• Gossip: engaging in the classic rumor mill to gain political advantage
• Sandbagging: purposely low-balling sales forecasts as a negotiating ploy
• Gray Zone: deliberately fostering ambiguity or lack of clarity about who should do what to avoid accountability

Filled with real-world, entertaining examples of games in action, Games at Work is an invaluable resource for managers and all professionals who want to substitute straight talk for games in their organizations and boost productivity, commitment, innovation, and—ultimately—the bottom line.

About the Authors

Mauricio Goldstein is the founder of Pulsus Consulting Group, a consulting company focused on Organizational Transformation initiatives such as globalizations, mergers and acquisitions, business model redefinitions, organization redesigns, and culture changes. His passion is to catalyze these organizational transformations by creating a space in which people and organizations establish a deeper connection to their essences, and where new solutions can emerge. Mauricio has applied his innovative approach to a number of Fortune 500 companies, such as AstraZeneca, Cargill, Glaxo SmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Sodexo, and Schering-Plough, in Latin America, North America, Europe, and Africa.

Over the years, Mauricio has received a number of awards for business impact, innovation, and academic performance from global corporations and public institutions. He has published articles on a variety of subjects from consumer behavior to knowledge management and culture change. He holds a B. Sc. in Industrial Engineering (1990) and an M. Sc. in Consumer Behavior (1996) from the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil), a diploma in Brennan Healing Science (2003) from the Barbara Brennan School of Healing (US), and an advanced certificate in Organizational Development and HR management (2004) from Columbia University (US).

Philip Read has worked in senior roles in human resources for a number of Fortune 100 companies over the last twenty-one years. He has lived and worked in the United Kingdom, the United States, China, Switzerland, Germany, and Spain, and has done business in sixty-four countries around the world. He has won a number of awards for his work, including the PricewaterhouseCoopers & Linkage, Inc. “Most Innovative HR Department” Award as part of the global HR leadership team of Dow Chemical, and was selected as one of the international executives whose career was studied for the book Developing Global Executives, by Morgan W. McCall Jr. and George P. Hollenbeck.

Over the years, Phil has led large restructuring projects, projects to drive rapid business growth in emerging markets, and projects to form significant joint ventures and integrate major acquisitions. He holds a master’s degree in natural science from Cambridge University and a master’s degree in international policy from the University of Bristol.