By Claire Michelle
The prevailing narrative around quiet quitting — the term that went viral on TikTok in 2022 before spilling into boardrooms — rests on a fundamental bias: it assumes that the employee who disengages is deficient, lazy, unmotivated and detached from economic reality. That reading is not only inaccurate but dangerous, because it leads leaders to look for solutions where the problem does not lie, rather than where it does: in the implicit contract binding the individual to the company.
According to Gallup, 59% of employees worldwide fall into the category of “quiet quitters” — in other words, workers who are no longer fully engaged but have not left their jobs. This figure, often brandished as a warning sign, nevertheless deserves a reading radically different from the one usually attached to it.
In behavioural economics, an employee is a rational agent who constantly weighs the effort expended against the value received in return, whether in the form of pay, recognition, career prospects or the meaning attached to their role. In classical economic theory, a rational agent is one who, according to Maurice Allais, pursues ends that are internally coherent and uses means suited to the goals being pursued. Applied to workplace behaviour, this definition leads to a conclusion that HR departments are usually reluctant to hear: the employee who quietly disengages is not irrational. They have simply concluded that their contribution is no longer being fairly rewarded. From that point on, strict adherence to the employment contract becomes a passive weapon for exhausted employees, because quiet quitting ultimately reveals a rupture. It is precisely this distinction that organisations struggle to make: between the legal contract, which defines formal obligations, and the psychological contract, which governs implicit mutual expectations.
When this second contract is breached — through unkept promises, chronic and unacknowledged overload, or a mismatch between stated values and actual managerial behaviour — the employee adjusts.
The paradox companies need to understand is the following: the quietly disengaged employee is not stealing value from the company. They are protecting themselves from burnout, which is infinitely more costly. Gallup estimates that disengagement and the departures linked to this phenomenon cost the global economy around $9 trillion a year in lost productivity. But these figures bundle together two very different realities: active disengagement — destructive, contagious and at times bordering on deliberate sabotage — and defensive disengagement, which is a perfectly rational form of individual risk management. A surgeon who refuses to operate beyond a certain number of consecutive hours is not disengaging: they are protecting the patient. The employee who switches off their computer at the time set out in their contract, after months of unacknowledged demands, is making the same kind of choice. The difference is that the first situation is regulated; the second is seen as a failing.
If quiet disengagement is rational, the irrational responses most companies deploy in return are bound to fail. Intensifying surveillance, multiplying team meetings, rolling out annual satisfaction surveys that measure the problem without fixing it — all this does is deepen the sense that the moral contract has been broken. Employees who are quietly quitting do what is necessary, and nothing more, and no call to go above and beyond will alter that balance as long as the conditions that produced it remain unchanged.
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