Assistant Professor Northern Kentucky University Northern Kentucky University
Abstract: The practice of management and leadership is often rife with new terms and ideas that sometimes fade away or give way to new ones. This cycle of the new, replacing old, is a characteristic of buzz management, where new ideas quickly surface and die down in the same manner. ‘Quiet quitting’ is the latest term that has surfaced in the management landscape. Quiet quitting is described as the action of not outright quitting a job, but rather quitting the idea of going above and beyond in the workplace (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/23/style/quiet-quitting-tiktok.html). It is seen as a way to preserve emotional energy in a bid to avoid the mental exhaustion and negative psychological wellbeing associated with a workplace environment that fails to meet an employee’s expectation of meaningful work (https://hbr.org/2022/08/quiet-quitting-is-about-bad-bosses-not-bad-employees). Many of the most recent practitioner pieces that have emerged point towards the younger workforce as being the drivers of this phenomenon (https://www.essence.com/news/money-career/quiet-quitting-feature/). Therefore, what we know about Quiet Quitting so far is that it is a generationally driven concept that is aimed at protecting the employee from workplaces that drain psychological and mental wellbeing by performing actions in job roles that meet the bare minimum expectations. The descriptions of Quiet Quitting overlap with existing management constructs and suggest that it is in fact repackaging information that is already known. Employee engagement, a hot topic issue among practitioners and scholars is the main construct that quiet quitting embodies. Employee engagement, described by Kahn (1990) is the combination of meaningful work, psychological safety (freedom to express yourself without fear of repercussions), and availability of resources (e.g. employer provided tools, development opportunities). There is ample evidence of what happens when some or neither of these three elements are available. This includes higher turnover, lower commitment, lower organizational citizenship behaviors, and lower performance (see Osam et al., 2020, Shuck & Reio, 2014). These negative outcomes are the visible manifestations when there is disengagement. Recently, there has been emergence of research that demonstrates that engagement is positively associated with mental and psychological well-being. In other words, when engagement levels are high, there is improved mental and psychological well-being (e.g. lower levels of burnout, exhaustion etc. (e.g. Osam et al., 2020). Therefore, attributes of Quiet Quitting are squarely in line with a disengaged workforce and therefore appears to be a restatement of an existing problem. We believe that the age-centered origins of this concept point to a much larger conversation that needs to move to the forefront of management research and practice: the importance of intersectional identity in the practice of employee engagement (Dillard & Osam, 2021). Elevating quiet quitting is in our opinion problematic because it attempts to address engagement issues without the recognition that our identities are key to how we experience and make meaning of the work environment. For example, the idea that giving your bare minimum is a way to protect your mental health is problematic for employees of color, who already must navigate a workplace environment that contains stereotypes that suggest that they are lazy or do not work hard enough. Quiet Quitting therefore has blind spots that are centered in identity which must be appropriately addressed. Methodology The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the problematic nature of the Quiet Quitting phenomenon to different identity groups thereby reinforcing the urgent need for scholars and practitioners to center identity in the practice of engagement. An intersectional lens will be utilized to address the research question that guides this study: “In what ways does Quiet Quitting minimize the importance of identity in the effective practice of employee engagement”? To explore this question, data will be collected from semi-structured interviews of 15-20 Black workers from Generations Z and X and analyzed through narrative analysis. Additionally, to capture the popular and unfiltered engagement on social media, data will be collected from a ‘Black Twitter’ thread on the subject of Quiet Quitting and analyzed using discourse analysis. Dr. Moody-Ramirez, professor of journalism, public relations and new media, defines Black Twitter as “a grassroots movement within Twitter that has provided a virtual community of mostly African-American Twitter users a collective voice on a variety of issues related to the Black experience” (https://www.baylor.edu/mediacommunications/news.php?action=story&story=207153). Given that Pew Research describes as most social media users being within the Generations Z and X communities, we feel that this virtual space will provide a nuanced and unique opportunity to engage data on this topic, as well as provide an opportunity to access a significant participant size.
