Case Study: Ozge, a mid-level software engineer, knew her weekly check-ins with Mark were merely an opportunity for him to catalogue errors. Mark frequently reclaimed her projects at the last minute, citing the old adage: “If you want something done right, do it yourself.” If Ozge attempted to challenge a requested amendment to a program, Mark would dismiss her, claiming she didn't understand the 'overall plan.' Tired of being treated as incompetent, Ozge stopped trying to manage the conflict. When Mark insisted on a poorly planned, urgent code change, Ozge implemented it exactly as requested, despite knowing it contained a critical flaw that would cause a minor system crash later that day. She saw no point in trying to avert a disaster when Mark would inevitably blame her for the perceived delay were she to raise doubts. This subtle act of sabotage assured wasted resources and a complete breakdown of trust.
The Clinical Idea:
Eric Berne’s idea of analysing human relationships through the prism of transactions is clearly highly applicable to the workplace, where people are first and foremost brought together by collective, organisational goals.
For Berne, a transaction was not necessarily cynical: to build long-term relationships, romantic or otherwise, for the giving and receiving of love is essentially transactional; but it also represents the height of human achievement and one of the key conveyances of purpose in life. At the same time, many transactions are indeed corrosive, underpinned by Machiavellian games and cruel, petty wins.
Berne argued that the extent to which a transaction was constructive or destructive depended, unsurprisingly, on the mindset of the parties involved. Deploying a heuristic that paralleled Freud’s tripartite structural model of id, ego and superego, Berne suggested that we could inhabit one of three broad states while engaging in relational transactions - that of parent (the voice of authority and moral imperative), child (the voice of rebellion and play) or adult (the voice of reason and rational collaboration). Of the last two, later models subdivided child and parent states into positive and negative forms: positively, you have the free, spontaneous child state, which complements the nurturing parent state; negatively, you have the rebellious, anarchic child state, which complements the controlling, overbearing parent state.
Framed in terms of the workplace, clearly one wants to create a culture in which people are most often engaging with one another on an adult-to-adult basis while also leaving space for the creativity, social bonding and rich mentorships that follow from positive child-to-child or child-to-adult relationships. Equally, cultures that normalise micro-management, censoriousness and robotic carrot-and-stick incentivisation tend to spawn broken communication, loss of trust, micro-rebellions and general disintegration of working teams into mutually suspicious factions. This, in turn, means clunky execution of processes and large-scale inefficiencies.
The Mechanism:
The key factor in fruitfully applying the PAC model to organisational contexts lies in understanding the corrosive complementarity of the critical child and the rebellious parent. In organisational language, critical parenting is often termed ‘abusive supervision’, manifesting in an excessive demand for control, a tendency to motivate through punishment or its threat and aggressive pursuit of unilateral decision making. As ever, this represents an extreme manifestation of dynamics that will likely surface in less acute forms, and at varying levels, even within broadly healthy organisations. In short, this is not only ‘some other company’s problem’.
In a paper studying the effects of toxic leadership on ICU nurses across two large hospitals, researchers found that a management style relying more heavily on the exertion of power to achieve outcomes overlaps with the decline of collegial collaboration and, conversely, the rise of antagonisms within working teams (Ramadan et al: 2020; 56). This erodes ‘employee satisfaction’ and organisational loyalty, resulting in greater attrition rates and, predictably, less inclination to make selective sacrifices for the greater good. Without commitment, ‘there will never be a good quality of services’, leading to ‘a bad image and poor outcomes’ (Ibid).
Other studies have drawn a distinction between abusive supervision, which involves the use of punishment to achieve results, and authoritarian leadership, where micro-management is the mechanism of power (Kılıç et al: 2019). This maps onto Transactional Analysis’s distinction between the controlling parent and the punitive parent. And as TA predicts, where these twin approaches form the strategic spine of leadership styles, employees increasingly see themselves working against management and the organisation. Though a sense of shared adversity may sometimes draw them into self-supportive peer groups (Ibid), these will be defined by withdrawal from the organisation and its aims even as workers “go through the motions” of work - often while casting their gaze towards more attractive horizons. Clearly this is hardly an optimal solution for the individual or the organisation.
In many ways, the attitude captured here mirrors that associated with the adaptive child, who disconnects internally from a persecutory parent even as they engage in adaptive performances designed to mollify them. An equally common, arguably worse, outcome is that employees on the sharp end of a toxic managerial style become disruptive and rebellious, either covertly or overtly. Just as a chaotic and rebellious child is often the counterpart to a persecutory parent, so it is that ‘counterproductive work behaviour’ - ignoring instructions, deliberately wasting time, withholding constructive feedback and even theft - is the counterpart to authoritarian leadership styles (Tepper: 2000). Conversely, Transformational leaders (who use rational communication and intellectual stimulation—key Adult functions) show the strongest positive correlation with employee performance, motivation, and creativity (Bass et al: 2006).
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3. Implementable Interventions
To transition the culture from the destructive Parent/Child cycle toward the productive Adult ego state, here are three high-impact, actionable steps to 'decontaminate' transactional dynamics:
The Adult-First Mandate: Implement a mandatory meeting protocol where all problem-solving, feedback, or decision-making discussions must start with objective data. The leader must ask, "What is the data/evidence, and what is your objective assessment of the situation?" This forces both parties out of emotional (Child) or judgmental (Parent) responses and into the Adult ego state before any solution is proposed. The Adult-First Mandate makes the rational analysis of reality the default transaction.
Decommission the Rescue Triangle: Proactively train managers to identify and cease their own Nurturing/Controlling Parent behavior when it manifests as 'Rescuing.' Instead of immediately taking over an employee's problem, managers must be trained to ask: "What are the options you've identified, and what resources do you need to execute your chosen option?" This simple intervention prevents the employee from defaulting to the helpless Adapted Child state, fostering self-management and Adult autonomy.
The Adult-Check Retrospective: Integrate a "PAC-Check" into all post-project reviews or incident analyses. The team must identify any moments of communication that were driven by Parent (blame/control) or Child (defensiveness/helplessness) and then re-state the conversation in the Adult voice. This objective reframing decontaminates the organisational memory of past failures and trains the team's capacity for rational, Adult-to-Adult collaboration.
4. Use Cases and Limitations
To guide your clients, the following table pinpoints where the lack of Adult transactions is most corrosive and the critical risk factors to monitor during implementation.
Organizational Context (Use Cases) | Strongest Clinical Alignment (Where the Adult State is High-Leverage) | Clinical Warnings (Where the Intervention Will Be Seen as Cynical) |
High-Consequence/High-Risk Firms | Directly shifts team focus away from the Rebellious Child’s counterproductive work behavior (CWB) and into the Adult's objective data processing, drastically reducing risk of error. | If leaders use the Adult-First Mandate to demand data but then punish any data that contradicts their initial, emotional opinion (a return to the Controlling Parent), the whole exercise will be seen as manipulative and destructive. |
Siloed Teams/Internal Conflict | Quickly diagnoses the Crossed Transaction (e.g., Adult question met with a Child defensive answer) that fuels conflict, offering a neutral lexicon for intervention and redirecting energy toward shared Adult goals. | Introducing TA language without deep training risks turning the ego states into blaming labels (e.g., "Stop being a Child about this"), which simply reinforces the original Critical Parent dynamic. |
Innovation/Creative Teams | Creates the safety required for the Free Child's creativity to surface. Leadership models the Nurturing Parent to support the creative output, but uses the Adult to manage the technical risk. | Over-reliance on the Nurturing Parent can lead to Nurturing Parent-to-Child dependency, where employees become incapable of handling critical feedback or taking independent action without constant affirmation. |
5. The Takeaway
Leadership that relies on punishment, micro-management, and excessive control is not strong; it is merely resorting to the easiest psychological shortcut—the Critical Parent. This approach systematically starves the organisation of its two most valuable resources: the creative energy of the Free Child and the objective problem-solving capacity of the Adult. By shifting your transactional defaults, you stop the cycle of dependency and rebellion, allowing your employees to dedicate their full cognitive resources to rational execution and innovative thought.
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Organisations on the Couch is written by Dominic Pakenham, a former EAP clinical manager and accredited BACP therapist based in Vancouver, Canada. I translate clinical theory into high-leverage organisational interventions designed for leaders, culture consultants and HR teams. |
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Footnotes:
Bass, B. M., & Riggio, R. E. (2006). Transformational leadership (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.
Kılıç, M., & Günsel, A. (2019). The dark side of the Leadership: The effects of toxic leaders on employees. European Journal of Social Sciences, 2(2), 51–64. https://doi.org/10.26417/ejss-2019.v2i2-64
Ramadan, A. H. A., & Eid, W. M. (2020). Toxic leadership: Conflict management style and organizational commitment among intensive care nursing staff. Evidence-Based Nursing Research, 2(4), Article 5. https://doi.org/10.47104/ebnrojs3.v2i4.160
Tepper, B. J. (2000). Consequences of abusive supervision. Academy of Management Journal, 43(2), 178–190.