When Super Bowl rivalries invade the office

"It's been a tough week," Jesse Harper says with a laugh. "This is pretty much the worst possible Super Bowl match-up that could happen for me personally."

A life-long New England Patriots fan, his team is playing in Sunday's Super Bowl. Harper is the CEO of his own company, i1 Biometrics, which develops wearable technology for non-professional football players to keep them safe on the field.

Life seems pretty good for him, so why the rough week? It has something to do with the fact that Harper's company is based in Kirkland, Washington -- just few miles outside of Seattle -- and he's had to survive in a workplace swarming with Seahawks fans.

"I have been getting bags of Skittles on my desk for Marshawn Lynch. I've had deflated footballs showing up on my chair. It's been a never-ending razz-fest all week long." he says. And his employees are enjoying watching him squirm as much as they love Russell Wilson.

"It's just another way for us as a small company to come together and try to make light of a fun situation," says Amy Thies, one of Harper's 15 employees. She admits to being partly responsible for the deflated football, a reference to the "deflate-gate" controversy. When Harper saw the ball on his seat, he looked at her with a smirk and swatted the ball across the room.

But despite the faux anger, she knows the rivalry between Harper and her fellow employees leading up to Sunday's game is a positive thing. "It really makes the team grow, too. We're lucky in that Jesse plays along pretty well."

And the fact that Harper and his team can have good-natured pranks at work can say a lot about the company's work-atmosphere year-round.

"It's a sign of a healthy workplace when people are having a good time with sports rivalries," says Dr. Lee Igel, an associate professor at New York University's Tisch Institute and a co-director of NYU's program on Sports and Society, which analyzes human behavior and its relation to the sports-world.

"In too many workplaces, things like putting deflated footballs or Skittles on somebody's desk -- we don't see many people chuckling about it. So really, as long as everyone's honestly getting a laughing out of it, we ought to be encouraging more of that in our workplaces."

But allegiances to teams can cause tension at the office if the work-environment is already what Igel describes as "sick".

"It's usually because the boss let it become an unhealthy work environment and the employees have contributed to it," says Igel, who suggests management should step in if things are getting out of hand. "It's usually helpful for the boss to come in and say 'Hey, that's enough.' It seems simple, but often it's not done."

As for CEO Jesse Harper, he's optimistic that Patriots quarterback Tom Brady could help carry New England to another Super Bowl win, but he has a more realist Super Bowl prediction.

"I already kind of loathe what's coming next week," he says, laughing again. "If the Seahawks win, I won't hear the end of it -- and that's okay. If the Patriots win, however, all I'm gonna hear is that they're cheaters and they didn't deserve it. But I'm just looking for a good football game."