It’s Not About the Money or Atmosphere. Something Else Kills the Will to Work

Quiet quitting: Not always a rebellion or exhaustion

Quiet quitting does not involve handing in a resignation or an open rebellion. It describes a situation where someone formally remains in their position but mentally withdraws more and more. They only do what they must, avoid engaging beyond the minimum, and stop putting in extra effort.

For many, this is simply a normal way of functioning at work

“Quiet quitting is a puzzling concept to me, but maybe I just don’t understand it. I rarely gave 120 percent at work… maybe once, when I was fresh out of university and had that mindset. But the years have jaded me,”

– wrote one user on Reddit.com.

And they are certainly not alone. More and more people at work today do only what is absolutely necessary — without excessive effort or standing out. We usually explain this through professional burnout or the difficulty of maintaining a work-life balance. However, as it turns out, that might not be the whole story. Often, the question arises whether the source of this withdrawal lies elsewhere.

What if the problem does not lie in the job itself?

Researchers from a School of Management in India decided to investigate something that has rarely appeared in conversations about work and engagement. Instead of asking about salaries, atmosphere, or management styles, they looked at personality. Specifically, they examined whether traits belonging to the so-called Dark Triad of personality might encourage a posture of professional withdrawal.

Psychology has long known the traits that foster withdrawal:

• Narcissism – characterized by a constant need for admiration from others and an exaggerated sense of self-worth.
• Machiavellianism – characterized by the manipulation of others and a focus solely on one’s own benefit.
• Psychopathy – meaning a lack of empathy, but also a tendency toward antisocial or impulsive behavior.

Over 400 managers from various industries participated in the study. Researchers used both online surveys and face-to-face interviews to examine their attitudes as accurately as possible. They checked the extent to which participants exhibited Dark Triad traits and then compared these results with their declared tendency toward professional withdrawal.

Not every dark trait works the same way

As the scientific journal ScienceDirect describes, individuals clearly exhibiting narcissism and psychopathy more frequently “silenced” their internal moral voice. In other words, they found it easier to justify behaviors that we would usually consider wrong. When these internal brakes stopped working, limiting effort at work began to appear as something completely normal, or even justified.

Machiavellianism falls silent when psychopathy and narcissism come into play

When researchers examined the results of the experiment, they noticed something astonishing.

“One result that was particularly surprising was that although Machiavellianism showed strong simple correlations with a sense of entitlement, moral disengagement, and the intention of quiet quitting, these relationships became insignificant when all three Dark Triad traits were analyzed together in the model. This was unexpected because Machiavellianism usually involves manipulation and unproductive behaviors, so we expected it to predict the intention of quiet quitting,”

– said Dr. Hanfia Rahman, one of the study’s authors, on the PsyPost portal.

The conclusion from the research is clear.

Character influences work, not the other way around

Work does not shape our attitude to the extent we used to believe. Rather, our character influences how we function within it. Personality traits such as narcissism or psychopathy can make it much easier for some employees to enter a mode of professional withdrawal.

In this sense, the results from the Indian scientists represent an important turning point in thinking about this phenomenon. They show that a lack of engagement does not always have to be a simple reaction to the work environment, management style, or salary levels.

Changing the way we think about employee engagement

These findings present managers with new challenges. If the problem does not always lie within the organization, the question remains: how do we recognize such attitudes and how do we react to them? This is especially true since, as practice shows, this topic is relevant not only in research but also in the broader labor market.

Quiet quitting by the numbers: How often we do the bare minimum

Reports from Pracuj.pl indicate that as many as 37 percent of employees admit they do only the absolute minimum at work — without proactive engagement in the company’s development. That is more than one in three of us. However, when looking closer at these declarations, the picture becomes even more interesting: women choose to put in extra effort more often than men, and office workers clearly engage more than those performing manual labor.

The latest scientific research suggests that the scale of this phenomenon is much more serious than previously thought. It is not always enough to appreciate an employee or offer them a higher salary. More and more evidence indicates that character largely determines the attitude toward work, rather than the conditions in which someone performs it. Therefore, understanding the roots of quiet quitting is becoming crucial for the future of modern management.

Read this article in Polish: Nie pieniądze i atmosfera. Coś innego gasi chęć do pracy