India, Sept. 27 -- Picture this : Jay worked as a technical consultant for a financial software company's taxation product team. For a new project, his team was forced to interact with the financial services team due to political pressure from senior management. As expected, the initial interactions were a bit contentious. The technical lead for the taxation team, Abhay, saw this as an opportunity to shine and mandated that he would be the point of contact for interacting with the financial serviced team. All communications were now required to be funneled through him.

This created a precarious situation for Jay. All his emails and documents were presented to the other team as if Abhay had produced them. Abhay was taking credit for every...