Workplace Stress in Alias, S01E01
Analysis by Jinane T.
Theoretical Overview
Stress can be defined as a feeling of anxiety, worry and tension perceived by an individual. While these feelings are the human means of identifying stress itself, they are technically the manifestation or byproduct of a stressful encounter. Stress is both a stimulus, and a response. The model of stressors, stress and outcomes employed in Organizations: Behaviour, Structures, Processes explains the concept of stress in the workplace using relationships between ‘stressors’ (the demanding situations that cause stress), ‘outcomes’ (the effects and consequences of encountering that stress), and ‘moderators’ (the personal set of characteristics, predispositions and conditions an individual processes stress with).
Background
Sydney Bristow, a vivacious, athletic grad student, discovers that her not-so-typical after-school job as an agent for SD-6, a top-secret division of the CIA, holds some deadly secrets that not only put her life in danger but also threaten the security of the free world... Recruited freshman year, the then shy and lonely Sydney jumped at the chance to add some meaning and excitement to her life. Little did she know how great she’d be at espionage or how much she’d love it. Today Sydney is no longer shy or alone. Boyfriend Danny has just proposed and her best friend Francie couldn’t be happier. Sydney now finds herself facing a moral dilemma: What does she want from the rest of her life, and what does she tell her friends and would-be fiancé?
Sydney’s SD-6 partner, Marcus Dixon, a devoted family man, warns her not to reveal her secret to Danny, and Sydney knows that SD-6 leader Sloane would not look kindly on any breach of security. If there’s one rule you don’t break, this is the one you don’t break. When Sydney breaks protocol and tells Danny about her secret life, her world is spun terrifyingly sideways: Danny’s life is placed in mortal danger, and Sydney is in a fight for her own life. She discovers that her long-estranged father, Jack Bristow, is also SD-6 and that the organization is covering up a nefarious plan — they are not a branch of the CIA, but are actually an enemy of the United States. With nowhere else to turn, Sydney seeks the aid of the real CIA to regain a sense of justice. She is enlisted as a double agent. Her mission is now to complete her cases at SD-6 while reporting her findings back to the CIA. Thus she begins the long and arduous task of destroying SD-6 from the inside. Towards the end of the pilot episode, Sydney learns that her father is also a double agent with the CIA, and she begins to question where his true allegiances really lie.
Relevant Video Segments:
* Sydney vents to Danny about her poor performance in an exam at school.
* Sydney tells her fiancé she is a secret agent.
* Sydney recalls her induction process into SD-6 during an awkward meeting with Danny. On a flight to their next assignment, Sydney discusses the pressures of keeping her identity a secret with colleague Marcus Dixon.
* Sydney returns home to find Danny murdered and confronts her boss, Sloane, at SD-6 headquarters.
*The foreign enemy tortures Sydney when she is captured on a Hong Kong assignment.
* Sydney makes a resolved return to SD-6 after her extended absence.
Analysis & Application
The first half of Alias’ pilot episode sees Sydney encountering stress on an individual level and on an organizational level. The fact that Sydney’s fiancé is unaware of her secret identity with the agency causes her a great deal of emotional difficulty. We see her lying to Danny about her job “with the bank” and making up locations for business trips to explain her absence during overseas work assignments. The toll this takes on Sydney is apparent in the scene where we see her relaxing at home with Danny. Even during an intimate moment with her fiancé, Sydney’s expression reveals that she is struggling with the idea of keeping her secret from him. Sydney is experiencing the cognitive outcomes of that stressor. Clearly, the strain of her secret wins out as Sydney decides to let Danny in on the truth in a behavioral outcome to that stress.
The unrelenting pace of action and change associated with working as a secret agent would ordinarily be an extremely pervasive individual stressor. This degree of change and action however, does not seem to cause serious health and/or psychological problems for Sydney – indicating that she probably differs in terms of personality from the majority of the population. We can say that Sydney possesses hardiness, a quality that is proven to offset, or buffer the stressful impacts of change an individual encounters. This would imply that Sydney fits the ‘three-characteristic theory of hardiness’. Hardy people:
• Believe they can control the events they encounter – we can assume this to be true simply due to the requirements of her job. If the belief that she can control a situation was not a natural personality trait Sydney possessed, it is something the agency would have instilled in her in order to ensure successful completion of the dangerous, risky and complex missions she is assigned.
• Are extremely committed to the activities in their lives – evidence of this can be found at the very beginning of the episode where Sydney fixates on her performance in an educational exam and is seen exercising and spending time with friends. Thus while the pilot episode is an introduction to Sydney’s work commitment, also apparent is the fact that she is dedicated to maintaining a balance of activities and relationships rather than letting her career consume her life.
• Sydney treats change in her life as a challenge – while the pilot episode does not provide enough anecdotal evidence to prove this once and for all, the fact that Sydney completes her SD-6 assignment several months after Danny’s death and returns to work with the resolution to destroy the organization she was once loyal to suggests that she derived some form of motivation from an unfortunate series of events and allowed the tragedy of losing her fiancé to shape her latest challenge.
This hardiness is one of many characteristics making up the moderators Sydney Bristow displays in dealing with stress. Clearly, and as apparent through the part of the episode where she recaps her induction into the organization, Sydney was recruited and trained as a secret agent because she displayed a set of individual moderators that made her able to deal with the stress of the job. These included her age, her single relationship status, lack of dependents and flexibility of lifestyle. It can also be assumed that her health and diet as a young, fit female could cope with the physical demands of the position, and once we realize that Sydney’s father is also part of the organization it becomes clear that she may even have the hereditary traits that SD-6 was looking for in a secret agent recruit.
Further evidence of Sydney’s moderators in action can be seen during her capture in Hong Kong where she is interrogated and tortured by the enemy. Sydney refuses to disclose information to the enemy even as they clamp her mouth open and tear out her teeth in a dark and dirty basement – pretty much as stressful as it gets! Sydney exhibits strength in moderating the stressful situation as she teases her torturers and exercises internal control and as great an external locus of control as is possible in this situation. The moderators in play are clearly Sydney’s personality, emotional stability, openness to experience and self-efficacy.
What is curious about the moderators Sydney is likely to possess, is the idea that she would/would not have adequate social support to deal with the stress of her work. While it is clear at the beginning of the pilot that Sydney does have social support in it’s basic form – a loving fiancé and close friends, the fact that she cannot share a massive part of her identity and day-to-day life in many ways negates the social support they are able to offer her. The closest form of true social support Sydney has could very well come from Marcus Dixon, the colleague we see her confide in during a flight towards their work assignment.
The second half of the pilot episode sees Sydney once again in a stressful situation when she learns that SD-6 is not actually a part of the CIA, but the very enemy she thought she was fighting. It seems however, unsurprisingly, that Danny’s death has altered her internal moderators as she now seeks justice and the destruction of her old employer, so her new cognitive and behavioral outcomes actually derive motivation from the stress, driving and directing her towards the need to succeed in her new post with the real CIA.
In a sense, Sydney takes on a journey in the way she deals with stress from beginning to end of the pilot episode. The best way of noting this change is to contrast the second and third times we see Sydney walk into the SD-6 office during the course of the episode. The second time is immediately following Danny’s murder, and Sydney enters the organizational office as a wreck, clearly not knowing how to cope with the extreme trauma she is experiencing. The third time however, after an emotional journey that took her several months, Sydney returns to the office with the scientific artifact that was required of her original mission and a strength, determination and passion that is evident in everything from her expression to her tone as she announces “I’m back”. Thus while each of these occasions stem from the same stressors, the outcomes are very different, and allude to the cyclical nature of the stressors-moderators-outcomes model.