Quiet quitting is a term that can be used to describe both a work behavior and a social media / news label. This study involves disentangling these two by investigating how being exposed to the label of “quiet quitting” describing other people’s behavior influences one’s perceptions about their own work. Drawing on the resonance literature, we theorize how exposure to the label “quiet quitting” may increase one’s work withdrawal, via both anger and moral disengagement. Additionally, we investigate how gender – whether the gender of the person exposed to the label matches with the person being described by the label – influences these relationships. To test our hypotheses we conducted a survey (Study 1) and a vignette experiment (Study 2). We find that exposure to the label “quiet quitting” is positively associated with work withdrawal, with this relationship mediated by anger toward one’s job and moral disengagement (Study 1). Furthermore, we find that females, compared to males, reported higher levels of anger toward their job and higher scores on certain aspects of moral disengagement when a fictional female employee’s behavior was described with the label “quiet quitting” (Study 2).
