Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

DOI

10.1002/hrm.70014

Publication Title

Human Resource Management

Volume

64

Issue

6

Pages

1815-1831

Abstract

Quiet quitting is a relatively new phenomenon that has quickly caught the attention of both practitioners and academics. With the world of work becoming increasingly interconnected, we contribute to the discourse by approaching quiet quitting from the novel perspective of understanding how others in the workplace perceive those who engage in quiet quitting. To do so, we first provide a formalized definition of quiet quitting and differentiate coworkers' perceptions of quiet quitting from similar psychological constructs (Studies 1–3). We then examine employee responses to coworkers engaging in quiet quitting with a qualitative study (Study 4) and vignette design (Study 5), finding that as an employee's perception of coworker quiet quitting increases, supportive behaviors decrease and workplace incivility behaviors towards the coworker increase. The effect on workplace incivility behaviors is moderated by self‐rated quiet quitting, such that employees who had higher self‐rated quiet quitting were more likely to engage in incivility towards a coworker regardless of whether their coworker was quiet quitting. Overall, by exploring quiet quitting observed by a coworker, we provide a different perspective on this construct and extend past research to show how employees feel about and react to a coworker's quiet quitting behaviors.

Rights

© 2025 The Authors.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Data Availability

Article states: "The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request."

Comments

This work was supported by Management Department and the Marketing Department at Old Dominion University.

ORCID

0000-0003-1991-3611 (Bennett), 0000-0001-9453-1256 (Epler), 0000-0001-8832-703X (Thomas)

Original Publication Citation

Bennett, A. A., Epler, R. T., Thomas, V. L., & Jalil, D. (2025). Exploring coworker perceptions of and reactions to quiet quitting. Human Resource Management, 64(6), 1815-1831. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.70014

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