Exploring Employees' Perceptions and Lived Experiences of Quiet Quitting

Abstract

The idea of quiet quitting, in which staff members reduce their overall effort while keeping their “discretionary” effort to the standard of the official job description, has become an important issue in the modern workplace. The research examines the employees' perception and lived experience of quiet quitting in the corporate context, the causes behind it, the emotions that trigger it and the response of the organization. The design was qualitative, phenomenologically oriented and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 employees of the banking, telecommunication, information technology and fast-moving consumer goods industry in Pakistan using purposive and snowball sampling method. Braun and Clarke's reflexive thematic analysis was used for the analysis of the data. The five themes that arose were redefining work boundaries, organizational causes, emotional triggers, organizational responses, and coping and future intentions. Participants did not view quiet quitting as laziness, but rather as a self-protective boundary setting strategy. The study is based on the concepts of Psychological Contract Theory, Conservation of Resources theory, and Social Exchange Theory, and provides empirical evidence from employees in a developing economy context, revealing that quiet quitting is a reversible reaction to violations in the employment relationship.