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Transactional Analysis

Change Management And Organization Development

1.1       All organisations are made up of people and human behaviour, though unpredictable can be understood more precisely with the knowledge of modern psychotherapy. The people come together and interact with one another in order to solve problems, collect information, discuss progress, give instructions and set goals. People also come together for the pleasure of company of each others. Most of the time of executives/ managers when they are on the job, is spent of instruction to the employees of their own concern or public if their department has public dealings.

1.2       Transactional analysis will enable you to understand your subordinate’s moods and feelings while exchanging the communication. Manipulation of the transaction will enable you to control the behaviour of your subordinates. The most important of all is that you can analyze your own behaviour with the help of this technique.

• Meaning of Transactional Analysis

2.1    Throughout the history, one impression of human nature has been consistent; that man has multiple nature. It is often said that man has a dual nature. Man can aspire and achieve goodness; which is evident from long human history. Goodness can be in the form of wisdom, justice and love according to great thinkers of the world. The goodness or good virtues have always been at war with evils, higher nature with lower nature and so on. In modern age, transactional analysis is used for the most easily understandable technique of analyzing human behaviour.

2.2       Any inter-personnel communication between two persons is termed as transaction. In the inter personal communication there is exchange of words and ideas. What one person speaks to the other, is known as “Transactional Response”. Behavioural stimulus can take the shape of speech, posture, gesture of action and when another person reacts to this stimulus, it is termed as “Transactional Response”. Behavioural response when received in response to a stimulus; completes a transaction. But the response itself may serve as a stimulus for the initiation of interaction and may evoke another response. Thus in this manner human interaction although appearing as a continuous affair can easily be seen as series of such stimulus-response transactions. When two parties are involved, there is social transaction through interaction of the people. The study of these social transactions between people is called transactional analysis. In other words transactional analysis is basically concerned with analysis of behavioural dynamic of the personalities.

• Ego States and their Causation

3.1    Human behaviour is multifarious. In a human being, there appear to be many small ‘Selves’ playing different roles at different time and in different roles in different situations. It is this fact, perhaps which makes human behaviour unpredictable, inconsistent, and irrational. Reaction to a given set of conditions depends on the momentary ‘ state of mind’. For example, a JTO is asked to stay beyond his working hours to complete some statement. The JTO had an appointment with one of his relatives for dinner immediately after working hours and, hence, his reaction in this condition may vary. He jumps, hearing this and shouts “You are unfair, I cannot stay and spoil my plan because of your whim. I am not going to stay as I have, already, an appointment with my relative”. “You may ask some one else to complete the statement, or if you agree, I can come early tomorrow morning to complete the work in time’.

These three statements of the JTO show three distinct levels of his mood. The pattern of behaviour exhibited by the JTO through his actions and responses is the casting of his mood. Where did this mood come from? It is, in fact, the product of an ‘ego-state’ of a person. It is the inherent ego-state of a person which leads the mental and physical behaviour of a person at any moment.

3.2       An EGO-STATE is defined as a consistent pattern of thinking, feeling and emotions which is source for human behaviour. There are three ego-states in every person. Each behavioural stimulus or response originates from one of these three distinct states.

3.3    In the transactional analysis, (TA), these three states are written with capital P, A and C. Thus each of us, has a parent, adult and child within us and may react from any one of these personality states at a given time. During a transaction one can change instantly from one state to another without a warning.

3.4       When one person converses with a second person, the first person is in a distinct ‘ego-state’ and can direct his or her message to any one of the three ‘ego-states’ but the second person may or may not respond from the same ego state from which the first person would have expected of him. Consequently the first step in transactional analysis is to recognize ‘ego-state’ and to know what their typical features are and where do they come from and acquire skill to distinguish one from the other when one sees them in operation.

3.5       Parent (P) Ego State:

A parent ego state consists of that body of data, recorded and stored in the brain, which comes from one’s observations about the way his/her parents and elders behaved. It deals with opinion, values, instructions and prescriptions, which a child has received from his/her elders. What the child observes in early stage of his life is recorded in his mind like permanent tape record. According to western thought, up to early five year period of life of a child is very important period for building of this ‘ego state’. According to Hindu concept of Sanskar, this period extends up to 12 years. Every thing the child has seen his parents doing and every thing he heard them saying, is recorded in his/her parent store. The data in ‘Parent’ was taken in and recorded straight without editing. The little child due to his dependency and his inability to construct meanings with words made it impossible for him to modify, correct or explain. Therefore, if the parents were hostile and consistently fighting each other, a fight was recorded with terror produced by seeing the parents fighting on whom the child was dependent. The child was exposed nearly every possible attitude and admonition of his parents up to five years of his life and hence forth further parental communications are essentially a reinforcement, of what has already been recorded.

3.6    Critical and Nurturing Parent Personalities.

3.6.1 Basically there can be two kinds of treatments and observations received by the child depending upon the types of parents he has. He can have following nature of information:

1. Critical information,
2. Values,
3. Orders,
4. Suggestions,
5. Inconsistency,
6. Do’s & Don’ts,
7. So on and so forth.

• These types of information form the critical part of his personality.
• If the child receives following nature of treatment he becomes Nurturing parent / Critical parents.

 

Nurturing Parent	Critical Parent
1.Get Support	1. Critical
2. Loved by parents	2. Evaluative
3. Helping cttitu$e of parents	3. Coercive
4. Encouraging	4. Prescriptive
5. Nourishing	5. Forcing
6. Nurturing kind of treatment	6. Restrictive

            3.7.0      Adult Ego State

3.7.1   The adult ego state is the logical, reasoning, rational and empirical part of an individual’s personalities that filters the information and accepts only the logical things. This part attempts to achieve some measure of objectivity, solves the problems, makes decisions and faces up the realities. The adult is, therefore, concerned with segregating facts from the fictions, evidence from opinion. Neither it is unduly influenced by the dictums of the parent nor it is emotionally influenced.

In adult state individuals gather relevant information carefully: analyze it, generates alternatives and make logical choices. Due to above characteristics, this part is known as ‘thought’ part of the personality.

3.7.2   The adult is a data processing computer, which grinds out decisions after computing the information from three sources i.e., the parent, the child and the data adult has gathered. How the adult gets data from three sources is shown in Fig.3.

3.7.3   The adult ego state examines the data in the parent ego state and sees whether these are true and applicable to the present situation and then accepts or rejects them. Similarly the adult ego state updates child data to determine whether the feelings recorded therein can be expressed safely. The adult within the adult utilizes the data gathered by the adult ego state after comparing and testing it with the present reality. The adult functions to update the data, with reality as shown below:

3.8.0 Child Ego state

3.8.1 While the parent side of the personality is recording external events, internal events are being recorded simultaneously by the child. Just as the parent is described as the ‘taught’ part of the personality, the child can be defined as the ‘Felt’ part of the personality. The body of data recorded and stored in the brain, concerning how individuals respond internally to what he saw and heard in the external world is labeled as ‘child ego state’. Since the little person has no vocabulary during the most critical part of his early experiences, most of his reactions are feelings. The ‘child state’ may be either submissive and confirming or insubordination, emotional, joyful or rebellious.

 

3.8.2   The following feelings may be recoded in the brain during the ‘child – state’.

1. Frustration
2. Inadequacy
3. Helplessness
4. Abandonment
5. Curiosity
6. Imagination
7. Spontaneous
8. Excitement born from new discover
9. Urge to touch.

• Continual observation has supported the assumption that the three ego states exist in all the people. In every person there is a little child resembling him when he was also a child. There are also in him own parents. His actual experiences of the internal and external events, the most significant of which happened during the first five years of his life are recorded in his brain. There is also a third state as mentioned earlier. The first two states are called parent and child and the third as adult.

 

3.8.4   The following figure briefly describes the transaction between the Parent, Adult and Child ego states.

The adult is one of the three ego states which is not tape recorded and it is Adult which uses the stored information / experiences to adopt the role of Parent or Child.

4.0 Identification of Ego states:

4.1 The utility of transactional analysis as a tool to understand social inter actions is directly linked with the ability to identify the ego state behind each transactional stimulus or response. Although the analytical ability is a skill which can be acquired with experience and practice, some information about the general nature of each state as well as verbal and non verbal clues associated with it, proves of immense help for beginners in identifying these ego states in the self as well as in the others. Typical nature of each ego state becomes apparent through certain physical and verbal expressions.

4.2 Purpose of developing technique of transactional analysis in persons are:
• New personal insight about their own needs and desires,
• More meaningful and integrated picture of others.
• The ability to analyze transactions that can lead to change behaviour.
• More effective personal and professional behaviour.

4.3 Analysis of transaction can be facilitated by familiarizing with the characteristics of the three ego states.

5.0 Nature of Ego States:

5.1 A gist of some human feelings, emotions and stimulus is given in the following tables. These have been classified into the typical ego-states.

 

5.2 Besides the three ego states which give rise to transactional stimuli and response, every individual assumes certain psychological postures or positions which guide and influence the general trend of the interactions which, he has with people. These four psychological positions are :

1. I AM NOT O.K. : YOU ARE OK.
2. I AM NOT O K. : YOU ARE NOT OK.
3. I AM OK. : YOU ARE NOT OK.
4. I AM OK. : YOU ARE OK.

5.3 During early childhood, the child is entirely dependent on his parent or parent substitutes so that a sense of inadequacy is developed. The child also feels that the parents are capable of doing many things, which he is not able to do. Therefore, the child adopts the position. “ I am not OK, You are OK.” Even when persons outgrow their childhood psychological position continues in them. Such people feel powerless when they compare themselves with others. This leads them to withdraw and suffer from depression.

5.4 The second position, namely, “I am not OK, you are not OK.” is taken by people who in childhood are brought up by unfeeling parents who deprive their children of physical and emotional stroking. These children are emotionally starved and they feel that not only they are not O. K. but even others are not O. K. when such children grow up they lose interest in living.

5.5 Cruel parents who treat their children in a very unsympathetic and brutal manner force the children to develop the position “I am OK, you are not OK.” This is the posture of persons who are victimized or prosecuted. They have a tendency to blame others and this is the position generally adopted by delinquents.

5.6 The above three positions are based on one’s feelings without objective thinking and analysis. It should be the endeavor of every person to move from the above positions to that of “I am O. K. you are O. K.” developed as a result of Adult thinking based on trust, faith and collaboration with other people. Such a psychological position is the result of emotional maturity and is mentally healthy. Such a posture enables people to solve their problems constructively.

5.7 People with the first position feel that “My life is not worth much”. With the second they feel that “Life is not worth anything at all”. With the third, they feel that “Your life is not worth much”. With the fourth, the feeling is that “life is worth living”.

6.0 Analysis of transactions:

6.1 When transactions take place between two individuals, the stimuli and responses from them originate in one or the other of the ego states. The vocabulary used, the tone adopted, the gestures made etc. during transactions depend on the ego state which gives rise to the stimuli and responses. By analyzing the transactions taking place between two individuals, it is possible to have an idea of the ego state from which the transactional stimuli or responses emerge. If the ego state is thus identified, both in ourselves as well as in others, it will help us to control our communication processes of other people.

6.2 Every individual has all the three ego states, though at one point of time one ego state may predominate over the others. During one interaction a particular ego state may be dominant throughout, through different stimuli and responses even in the course of a single interaction may be caused by different ego states. Needless to say that the ego states are in no way related to the chronological age of the person. A child has an Adult ego state and a parent has a child ego state.

7.0 Conclusion

7.1 Transactional Analysis increases the managerial effectiveness. This is possible if the leadership or manager understands his own behaviour, which is biggest determining factor for his subordinates’ behaviour. Most of the psychological techniques offer insight into the understanding of others behaviour but they fail to throw light on the perception of self-behaviour by an individual. The transactional analysis is the technique by which you can judge your own behaviour and that of your subordinates or a group of subordinates perceive their own behaviour. You will be having a tremendous energy to influence, direct and therefore control the subordinates’ behaviour through the use of transactional analysis.

7.2 Another important use of the transactional analysis is that it provides the most scientific clue to the motivational problems. The work of Douglas McGreger, Maslow, Likert, etc. point out that resort to external motivational techniques like threat, punishment, coercion, temptation for bonus, other monetary benefits are not only unnatural way of motivating people but they are also quite unscientific. Motivation should be from within.

7.3 Transactional Analysis believes that every body is born autonomous. A normal human being is full of energy, initiative, ideas and desire for making contribution. There are some basic personality needs of the individual. You need not have to find out external way of motivating your subordinates. You have to recognize their egoistic needs individually and provide them proper environmental framework to operate in a normal way. In this type of climate, the individual will thrive to make his contribution. Entire theme of transaction analysis is personality ego satisfaction. By properly analyzing the needs through proper transactions and changing his own life position, a manager can increase the level of commitment, loyalty, motivation, sense of security and sense of belonging within the individual. You cannot be effective whatever may be individual level of competency, as a manager, unless you are able to develop team spirit and reduce the interpersonal, interdepartmental and inter group conflicts in your organisation. Transactional analysis opens the mysterious and complex box of human behaviour.

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