Abstract
Quiet Quitting (QQ) and the Great Resignation (GR) have been widely invoked to explain post-pandemic shifts in employee behavior. Yet within management and organizational behavior research, both phenomena are predominantly framed through individualized lenses emphasizing motivation, engagement, and psychological adjustment. This paper adopts a problematizing review approach to examine how QQ and GR have been theorized, what assumptions underpin dominant explanations of workforce withdrawal, and how these assumptions shape managerial and policy responses.
Drawing on a two-stage review of 241 articles across management and interdisciplinary literatures, we demonstrate that QQ is frequently constructed as a performance deficit, while GR is treated as a rational labor-market reaction. We argue that these framings obscure the structural, relational, and moral conditions under which withdrawal unfolds. We conceptualize QQ as within-role boundary-setting enacted under organizational and institutional constraints and treat GR as a historically bounded labor-market episode that reshaped how exit and dissatisfaction were interpreted rather than as a stable behavioral construct.
By distinguishing between staying while withdrawing and leaving as outcome, we advance a mechanism-based understanding of workforce withdrawal that moves beyond engagement–disengagement binaries. The paper contributes to theory by challenging engagement-centered assumptions embedded in dominant frameworks such as JD–R and Psychological Contract Theory, and by integrating critical and interdisciplinary perspectives that foreground power, misrecognition, and institutional strain. Implications for research, management practice, and labor policy are discussed.