An employee lodges a grievance. The employer acknowledges it, schedules a meeting three weeks out, commissions an investigation. The investigation takes two months. The outcome letter is inconclusive. The employee appeals. More meetings. More delays. Six months pass.
From the employer's perspective, this is a process being followed. From the employee's perspective, it is an endurance test. Both are right. The problem is that they are right about different things — and the mismatch between their strategic frames is where the real danger lies.
Two Games, One Grievance
In game theory terms, the protracted grievance is a War of Attrition. Both sides are incurring costs — the employee in stress, career damage, and the corrosion of continuing to work in a hostile environment; the employer in management time, HR resource, and accruing liability. The question is who blinks first. The employer, often without consciously deciding to do so, is betting that the employee will tire before the process concludes. The employee is betting that persistence will eventually force a meaningful concession.
But at some point — usually when the grievance outcome arrives and is, as it almost invariably is, unsatisfactory — the game changes. The employee is no longer enduring a process. They are facing a binary decision: file a tribunal claim or accept the result. This is not attrition. This is a Game of Chicken. Crash (file, potentially resign) or swerve (accept, stay, move on). The dynamics are entirely different. In attrition, time is the weapon. In chicken, commitment is.
The same grievance, modelled as two different games. The structural difference — repeating endurance versus one-shot commitment — explains why advice that works in one frame fails in the other.
The Mismatch
The dangerous moment is when one side has crossed from attrition to chicken and the other has not noticed.
The employer, still operating in its institutional rhythms — grievance panels, appeal hearings, HR correspondence — may believe it is still in attrition. There is still time. The employee will tire. The process continues. But the employee has already shifted. Every day is no longer about endurance. It is about the decision: crash or swerve. The employer's bureaucratic delay, which the employer experiences as neutral process, the employee experiences as provocation — evidence that the organisation does not take the complaint seriously, further ammunition for a constructive dismissal claim, another reason to crash rather than swerve.
Anatol Rapoport's taxonomy of 2×2 games (1967) identified that the same objective conflict can be classified as fundamentally different game types depending on each party's subjective model of the interaction. John Harsanyi's work on incomplete information games (1967–68) formalised this further: when players have different private beliefs about the structure of the game, rational play by one side can look irrational — or provocative — to the other. Thomas Schelling, in The Strategy of Conflict (1960), showed that coordination depends on shared frames of reference. When the frames diverge, coordination fails even when both sides would benefit from it.
Employment practitioners see this daily. They just do not usually describe it in these terms.
The Reverse Mismatch
The asymmetry works in the other direction too, though less commonly. A persistent grievant — one who appeals, raises new complaints, extends the process — may be playing attrition: believing that if they just keep going, the employer will eventually concede. But the employer has shifted to chicken. It is calculating: settle now or hold firm? The employee's continued persistence is turning up the pressure on the employer's crash/swerve decision without the employee realising it. If the employer suddenly crashes — rejects the grievance outright, or worse, begins disciplinary proceedings — the employee who thought they still had runway is caught flat-footed.
The Practical Point
The single most valuable thing a practitioner can do at the grievance stage is identify which game the other side thinks it is playing. If the employer is in attrition but the employee has shifted to chicken, an early ACAS notification reframes the game for the employer — forces them out of their complacent process posture and into the crash/swerve calculus. If the employee is in attrition but the employer is in chicken, the employer's next move will be decisive rather than procedural, and the employee needs to be ready for it.
Most grievance advice focuses on the substance: what to say in the meeting, how to frame the complaint, what outcome to request. That is necessary but not sufficient. The strategic question is structural: what game does each side think it is in, and what happens when those assessments diverge?
The protracted grievance breaks down not because the parties disagree about the facts. It breaks down because they disagree about the type of disagreement they are having.
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Open the Strategy Lab →References
- Harsanyi, J. C. (1967–68), 'Games with Incomplete Information Played by "Bayesian" Players', Management Science, 14(3/5/7)
- Rapoport, A. (1967), 'Exploiter, Leader, Hero, and Martyr: The Four Archetypes of the 2×2 Game', Behavioral Science, 12(2), 81–84
- Schelling, T. C. (1960), The Strategy of Conflict, Harvard University Press