Transactional Analysis: Social Psychology

Transactional Analysis: Transactional analysis is a social psychology developed by Eric Berne during the 1960s, which has further evolved over the past four decades to include applications to psychotherapy, counseling, education and organizational development. Transactional Analysis (or TA as it is often called) is a model of people and relationships and is based on two notions: first that we have three parts or 'ego-states' to our 'personality. The other assumption is that these converse with one another in 'transactions'.
Transactional Analysis helps people identify their ego states, recognize the inner dialogues between ego states, evaluate and improve the ways in which their ego states function, especially those that involve a harsh demeaning
The Parent, Adult and Child ego states and the interaction between them form the foundation of transactional analysis theory. These concepts have spread into many areas of therapy, education, and consulting as practiced today.
Transactions - Transactions refer to the communication exchanges between people. Transactional analysts are trained to recognize which ego states people are transacting from and to follow the transactional sequences so they can intervene and improve the quality and effectiveness of communication.
Strokes - People need strokes, the unit of human contact and recognition for psychological and eventually physical survival, just as they need food, water and air. Understanding how people give and receive positive and negative strokes and changing unhealthy patterns of stroking are powerful aspects of work in transactional analysis.
Games People Play - Berne codified socially dysfunctional behavior patterns in terms of the "games" that people play. Games are essentially devious, toxic and sometimes deadly methods of obtaining "strokes". These repetitive stroke-gathering interactions are the building blocks of people's life
These three components are instrumental to the successful operation of an organization. However, the lack of one or more of these components can cause dysfunctional behavior at an organization. All organizations tend to perpetuate dysfunctional behaviors within certain parameters. As long as the behaviors are limited, they may not hurt the organization too much. When they take over or influence critical areas, they can become major problems in an organization. These behaviors are functional for the individual and help them ―get along‖ within the environment but dysfunctional for optimum organizational performance. Every organization has unspoken rules that are designed to protect people from accountability. Internal norms may be counter-productive to the organizational mission. Identifying and changing problematic norms is essential to creating a high performance organization. Examples might include systems where people protect, defend or hide bad behavior in the interest of getting along even when the behavior can have major detrimental effects on the environment.
The company's methods of rewarding individuals are another component of organizational architecture that has caused dysfunctional behavior within the organization. For example, in my company,