Transactional Analysis and the Johari Window have been recurrent themes of discussion and study in second semester, chiefly because we have entire papers in Organisational Behaviour and Organisation Development. I find these interesting, but, more than that, they're extremely challenging.
I know the technical details of TA alright, but it still intrigues me how people interact. If I have got TA right, I was in Child mode when I chose to jump out of bed and head straight to the computer when I should actually have picked up my books instead. Now that I am here, I'm likely in Adult state, writing objectively (or trying to) about something that interests me. But this is only about me in relation to myself...I haven't quite interacted with anyone yet all this morning.
Why TA is so challenging is that people constantly switch modes - and they do so without knowing it. It was awesome, discovering for myself the contrasts in biological and ego states - I was stunned the first time I heard that a toddler could also, technically, at least, be an Adult.
I won't go into the details of TA. If you'd like to, you can read about it here (Go Wiki!). I won't even go so far as to say that it explains all the intricacies of human interaction...but it does make a fairly decent beginning. Enough, anyway, for a student of OB and OD to consider Psychology the greatest contributor to these fields (though economics and sociology would come a close second).
The Johari Window is another fascinating idea, albeit a little nebulous. I'm still struggling with the concept of the Unknown, or the third quadrant. I'm still a little uncertain about how completely unexplored, uncharted territory can help in cognition. My friend suggested, as a rather funny example, the case of someone who is a good athlete and doesn't know it. Because he doesn't know it, he has never attempted an event, so the world doesn't know either. Then, one day, he sprints across the sports field and suddenly everyone gets to know!
While the example did afford me a laugh, I had to tell him it didn't do much for my understanding. I'm still in the process of reading this up. If anyone has any suggestions, please do let me know. If you'd like very basic reading on the Johari Window, here it is.
Before I go, one last, rather hilarious thing: Just for the heck of it, I googled "Free MBTI Profiling", and got at least four hits. MBTI, apparently, is big on the OB and HR scene - it costs about $150 to get one person profiled by the Myers-Briggs Institute. Which goes to explain the five different questionnaires I found online. Admittedly, they all seemed to test the same attributes...but the way they did it varied vastly...to the extent that I was classified as INFJ and ESTJ - each a personality type completely at variance with the other - on the same day, by two different tests that purported to measure exactly the same attributes.
Which is a lesson to me: leave the testing to the experts.
No comments:
Post a Comment