Stressors in Ugly Betty, S01E08
Analysis by Hala A.
Definition: Stress is a feeling of tenseness, anxiety or worry. It is resulted by many different Stressors. A stressor is a potentially harmful or threatening external event or situation. Stressors fall into three main categories and stress may also be caused as a result of a mixture of them. Stressors come at an Individual, Group, and Organizational level or Non-work issues. Individual stressors include role conflict or ambiguity or overload. It also includes Responsibility for people, harassment of pace of change. “Role conflict is present whenever compliance by an individual to one set of expectations about the job is in conflict with compliance to another set of expectations.
Facets of role conflict include being torn by conflicting demands from a supervisor about the job and being pressured to get along with people with whom you are not compatible. Group and Organizational stressors include Intra/Inter-group relationships, organizational culture and non work stressors are mainly those you find at a person’s home. Intra/Inter-group relationships describe a person’s relationship with other members of the organization or the group where his work is located. Organizational Culture is a distinction that this organization has, for example, taking clients out to dinner and discussing business over drinks. Another example of organizational culture is whether it is autocratic, democratic or laissez-faire. Examples of non-work stressors are taking care of the elderly, children, the house and also taking college courses.
Background: Ugly Betty is a television series, taken from a Latin-American series called (Betty,La Fea). Betty Suarez, originally a Latin-American, is a Queens University graduate and she has absolutely no fashionable taste or beauty. However, she is very smart and this is why she was hired by Bradford Meade, in charge of Mode Magazine which is a fashion magazine, as Daniel Meade(his son)’s personal assistant. She proves herself and her intelligence until she becomes really in charge and Daniel is very dependant on her. She lives with her father (Ignacio), her sister (Hilda) and her sister’s son (Justin). Betty is very attached to her family, especially her father. They always do everything together and this episode is about Betty being torn away by work and by her family. She always cooks at Thanksgiving with her father but her being very busy with work makes it unbelievably difficult for her to be on time and she forgets about Justin’s pageant and everyone at home including her is saddened.
Analysis: Being a personal assistant, Betty should always attend to her boss’s demands, Daniel, regardless of the time, place or even the shallowness of these demands. Even on the day -in which everyone leaves early to be with their family-of Thanksgiving, she has Daniel calling her every few minutes, asking her strange questions about how to Salsa or what to do or say when Sofia is around.
Betty here clearly suffers role conflict especially when it comes to her being a person who also has a family to take care of and shouldn’t be called over to pick a shirt. Her role conflict comes between what she is supposed to do as a personal assistant for Daniel and what he asks her to do. A personal assistant answers calls, confirms meetings and schedules but she is being used for picking a shirt color on Thanksgiving Day. One would say that it is okay to pick his clothes for a big meeting or presentation in office-time but not on Thanksgiving. This makes Betty question what her role is in this organization and she clearly stresses whenever Daniel calls.
Another big Role Conflict which happens to be repeatedly apparent in this episode is between work and non-work, where Betty has always taken care of her family and has always been keen on keeping traditions alive with her dad after her mother died. Here, she is torn by Daniel’s calls, asking her to come over and between her shopping and cooking and making the dessert that she and her dad always do together in Thanksgiving. She yells at Daniel telling him “I have a family too” which very evidently shows her stressing over the things he asks her to do on this very important “family” night.
We also see that Betty’s relationship with the people in the magazine is not good especially with Amanda and Mark. This is since they always make fun of her and act as if she isn’t there but we don’t directly see Betty feeling sad because of this stressor which goes under the name Inter/Intra-group relationships . However, we kind of see she’s moved on from this problem at work in that she hears the comments and just smiles back sarcastically and all she cares about is Daniel and her job.
Betty is also a modest, middle class girl who starts her job in this high-class fashion magazine with all the team or staff dressing so elegantly and fashionably. This is called an Organizational Culture stressor which Betty -in her very bad-looks and choice of clothing-faces. She is consistently being mocked about her choice of items behind her back and in front of her and sometimes she doesn’t even notice it ,hence Mark’s “Slimming!” comment by which he meant “fattening”. However, we don’t see her stressing so much about this in this episode or to put it in percentage terms of her stress-10% which is not that high- since her self-confidence and her job are all she really cares about in the magazine.
Another stressor we see in this episode is Non-work where she has family obligations and she has to take care of her family and she leaves Daniel after she goes to his studio to help him pick a shirt, tells him about how she feels and heads right back to another family matter which is investigating the fake lawyer her sister just hired. Betty likes taking care of her family and their dependency on her .Thus, she questions her job and feels sad about having to work to the extent of sacrificing and compromising this valuable familial connection in favor of her job.