Organisational Transactional Analysis: Looking Beyond the Individual
What if the problem isn’t really where the complaint is?
Two people repeatedly clash at work. A leadership team goes round and round the same conversations without quite reaching a decision. A new manager arrives, but somehow the organisation continues to operate as though their predecessor - or even its founder - were still in charge.
It is easy to start with the people involved. Who needs to communicate differently? Who is struggling in their role? What is happening in the relationship between them?
Those can all be useful questions. But organisational Transactional Analysis (TA) offers another possibility: what if something in the wider system is helping to create the difficulty?
That changes where we look - and potentially where we intervene.
From individual TA to organisational TA
Many practitioners first encounter Transactional Analysis through counselling, and psychotherapy. The TA concepts such as ego states, transactions, games and script give us ways of thinking about individuals and relationships.
But TA also has a substantial body of theory concerned with groups and organisations.
In 1963, Eric Berne published The Structure and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups, setting out ways of thinking about boundaries, leadership, membership, roles and the psychological life of groups. It isn't simply clinical TA transferred into the workplace.
In organisational TA, the team or organisation becomes the client. That means looking not only at the people within a system, but at how the system itself is structured and how that structure affects what happens between them.
For therapists, counsellors, coaches and supervisors who are accustomed to paying close attention to individuals and relationships, that can involve a significant change of perspective.
When a relationship problem is also a structural problem
Imagine two capable people who repeatedly come into conflict.
We might explore their communication. We might think about personality, relational patterns or previous experience. We might help them understand one another better.
But suppose their roles overlap.
Both have responsibility for the same decisions. Neither is entirely clear where their authority begins and ends. Each therefore has good reason to step into territory the other believes belongs to them.
The relationship may become increasingly difficult, but the difficulty isn't only relational.
Replace both people with two equally capable people and, unless the roles change, there is a good chance that some version of the conflict will return.
This is one of the useful shifts that organisational TA can offer: before assuming the difficulty sits within the people, look at the positions the system has asked them to occupy.
Working only on communication might improve the relationship for a while. It doesn't necessarily resolve the structural conditions producing the conflict.
Three levels to pay attention to
In her work with organisations, Drs Sari van Poelje uses three diagnostic levels: structure, dynamics and psychodynamics.
Structure
This includes the visible architecture of the organisation: boundaries, roles, hierarchy, authority and decision-making. Who is responsible for what? Where does one role stop and another begin? Who can make which decisions? How clear are the boundaries between teams, functions and levels of leadership?
Dynamics
This is what actually happens between people within that structure. Who has influence, regardless of their job title? How do people communicate? Where do recurring conflicts or games appear? What happens when someone challenges the established way of doing things?
The formal org chart might tell us one thing; the relationships in the room may tell us something quite different.
Psychodynamics
There is also a less visible level. People bring previous experiences of authority, belonging, leadership and groups into the organisations they join. Teams and organisations develop their own expectations and stories too.
Berne's concept of the group imago - the internal picture a person carries of what a group is or should be. These expectations can continue to shape organisational life even when nobody is talking about them directly.
Why the levels matter together
The three levels are not separate. A structural problem can create a relational one.
A relational difficulty can become attached to earlier experiences and expectations.
And psychological dynamics can influence how people respond to an otherwise sensible change in structure.
This is why an intervention can appear to work and then, a few months later, the same problem returns in a slightly different form.
For someone whose professional training has developed a strong relational or psychological perspective, organisational TA adds another question:
Is the problem I'm seeing between these people actually being produced, at least in part, somewhere else in the system?
For someone coming from organisational development or coaching, the movement can be in the opposite direction:
Why does a well-designed structure keep producing something that the structure alone doesn't explain?
Neither perspective replaces the other. The value comes from being able to move between them.
Organisational Transactional Analysis is its own field of practice
Organisational TA is not about analysing individual employees or treating a workplace as though it were a therapy group. The client may be a team or an organisation: an entity made up of individuals, but also shaped by its structure, boundaries, purpose, history and patterns of relating.
Contracting changes. Diagnosis changes. The focus of an intervention changes.
Sometimes the most useful intervention may be a conversation between two people. At other times it may involve clarifying roles, looking again at decision-making or noticing that the formal leadership of an organisation is not where its real influence lies.
The skill lies partly in recognising which level you are looking at — and whether it is the level at which change is actually needed.
You don't need to be an organisational consultant to notice systems
Most of us are already part of organisations and systems. It might be a counselling practice, a training institute, a charity, an NHS team, a school, a professional body, a partnership or a group of colleagues working together.
We can start by becoming curious about what happens there.
Where are the boundaries?
How clear are the roles?
Who has formal authority - and who has actual influence?
What problems keep returning, even when the people involved change?
Looking at organisations means widening the frame around them.
Think of a conflict you are working with now, or one you know well.
If you removed both people and replaced them with others, would the conflict still be there?
If the answer might be yes, where else in the system would you look?
Interested in exploring organisational TA?
Physis Scotland works with Drs Sari van Poelje, TSTA(O), EMCC Master Coach, and Intact Academy to offer training in the application of Transactional Analysis to teams and organisations.
The programme is relevant to TA practitioners who want to understand the organisational field, as well as coaches, consultants and organisational development practitioners interested in developing a more systemic way of working.
Our introductory workshops offer an opportunity to explore some of these ideas with Sari and consider how organisational TA might connect with the work you already do.
Part of our Organsiational TA Blog series
