Transactional Analysis: Another Way of Approaching OR/MS Implementation

Churchman and Schainblatt and successive workers have approached the implementation of OR/MS recommendations as an interaction between the manager and the management scientist. Over the past decade, the transactional analysis (T. A.) approach has been applied widely to the study of two-person interactions and “games people play.” In this paper, the authors compare the T. A. approach with the above approach. We suggest that they are complementary, and speculate as to the value of T. A. and “game playing” in modelling the implementation and evolution of OR/MS in organizations.