I came across this piece on Gamasutra the other day, and I thought it made an interesting read. If anything the comments are more interesting than the article. There’s definitely some good insight in there.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21488

One of Brenda’s key pieces of advice seems to be “complain upwards” - ie go to your boss, don’t just moan to those around you, that just spreads the negative vibes. I can see the sense in this, especially as someone who often gets frustrated and ends up moaning.

As one of the comments hints at, that only really works if you have a sufficiently structured team: “this article was really important, teams melt-down follow me around, and now I see that this is because of the trashtalk that we do (basically, in the university the team structure ends with noone being the lead, since we have noone to complain from other person, we complain with everyone else…)”.