Assistant line manager Reginald Strongbow is one of thousands of people whose working day is a struggle through frustration, missed opportunities and endless backbiting.

A hard-working team leader in a multinational corporation, he has seen repeated attempts to break out of middle management fail dismally and frequently finds himself, the manager, being managed by his team.

Today the team has an important presentation to make, but Reginald has failed to notice his colleagues disappearing from the office one by one, so when the presentation goes wrong (as it invariably will), he will be left alone to take the flak. Another working day gone spectacularly wrong.

Fortunately for Reginald, he is a fictional character. Unfortunately for the rest of us, he is a composite character based on hundreds of interviews with managers and executives from the world's leading companies, and has been developed as a case study that people in business can identify with.

He is the brainchild of Dr Kathleen Reardon, professor of management at the University of Southern California business school and the Irish Management Institute's (IMI's) first distinguished research scholar.

Dr Reardon uses characters like the hapless Mr Strongbow in her work as a consultant on the politics of business management.

"With Reginald, he never looks ahead or formulates any plans. He should have known where everyone on his team was going to be at the time of the meeting, so that he wouldn't be the fall guy," she says.

"The message I want people to take away from this is: don't let your work life happen to you. Too many people react rather than respond. A reaction is on impulse, a response involves weighing options so you don't put your foot in your mouth.

"A lot of the people I talked to say they often have circumstances where they wish they'd taken the other option. Reginald is based on them."

Although she was only given her current IMI appointment in March, Dr Reardon has been working with them for several years. She had been visiting Ireland for more than 20 years before she moved to Schull, Co Cork, in 2000, and has since worked with AIB, Glanbia, Pfizer, Bank of Ireland, Eircom and dozens of other Irish companies, as well as research work with Trinity, UCD and UCC.

Her specialities are negotiation and persuasion, and mastering office politics. As well as giving lectures and consultancy work, she has written several bestsellers, including The Skilled Negotiator and The Secret Handshake.

"When I started off in my first job I though that hard work alone would propel me up the ladder, and I wouldn't have to get involved in office politics. Of course, that is the case up to a certain point.

"After that, the person sitting to the right of you and to the left of you are equally confident and equally competent as you, so you need three things to make yourself stand out from them; to be able to negotiate, to persuade and, most importantly, to understand politics. You can't negotiate unless you know the political milieu you're working in."

In the course of her work, Dr Reardon has developed two archetypes, the political purist and the political streetfighter.

"Political purists are often young and naive. They believe that, if they do a good job, they'll get ahead on technical skill alone. Political streetfighters watch their back and know the work is rough and tumble. A lot of it is perception, how you present yourself to different individuals.

"If you need to appear to be a duck, you don't have to be a duck. As long as you waddle and quack, you'll sound like a duck," she says.

One tendency Dr Reardon wants to crush is the "us against them" mentality.

"Sometimes I'm called into a crisis situation at a company where there's a standoff, whether it's internal or external, and they'll say to me: 'We want you to see what their problem is', More often than not, the problem is not just with 'them' but closer to home. That goes for individuals as well. We're about 75 per cent responsible for how other people treat us but we often blame other people for the situations we find ourselves in.

"There will always be people in a company who are frustrated about their lot, and start backbiting and going underground rather than doing something positive about it. That's dangerous for management, because you find people who you think are with you, but in fact are bitter and frustrated and against you.

"To avoid these kinds of situations, sophisticated managers would have a director, or even a team, studying the political culture in the workplace. The extra payroll would be justified by the efficiency this would bring to the company."

Wouldn't that create paranoia and mistrust in the office though? Her answer is typically direct: "Not if you did it properly."