Hoboken, N.J., August 22, 2025 — Ever felt like doing a bare minimum at work? Not investing any extra effort, not going any extra mile? You aren't alone. That's a known workplace phenomenon. It's called quiet quitting.
The term quiet quitting is used to describe the action of employees who reduce their work efforts to only the absolute minimum required for their job. Although they are not formally resigning, they are "quitting" any work and commitment beyond what's explicitly listed in their job description.
Commonly attributed to issues such as work dissatisfaction, burnout or lack of purpose, quiet quitting isn't a new phenomenon. However, in the post-pandemic years, it has seen a definitive resurgence, prompting two Stevens researchers to team up for a study to pinpoint its underlying causes.
"We were seeing a lot of #quietquit hashtags and a lot of publicity about it," says Assistant Professor Justine Herve whose research focuses on labor economics. "We were really puzzled by that resurgence and trying to understand what happened during the pandemic that caused this phenomenon to come back." Herve's colleague, Assistant Professor Hyewon Oh , who studies consumer wellbeing aimed to help people lead a happier life, was also intrigued by the phenomenon. "As a consumer psychologist, I've always been interested in what shapes people's sense of well-being and meaning in their daily lives. We started talking about quiet quitting and wondered — was it simply about disengagement at work, or was there something deeper happening?" Oh says. "This phenomenon was kind of overlapping our research interests." So they decided to join forces.
Study authors note that quiet quitting isn't necessarily negative. "Quiet quitting means that employees are still doing what's expected of them, they are still performing their duties," says Herve. "They are just not going the extra mile, not taking on extra tasks, not devoting more time to their work beyond the required hours." That's different from disengagement, she adds. "Refusing to perform tasks beyond what is required contractually does not necessarily imply disengagement during the agreed-upon work hours."
What caused the resurgence of Quiet Quitting in the post-pandemic era? The collaborators hypothesized that this behavior was linked to individuals' reduced perception of control over their circumstances in periods of uncertainty such as the pandemic. To test this, they recruited about 1400 participants through CloudResearch, an online platform that offers survey data collecting tools. The survey participants were asked a series of questions about their perception of control over their lives. Their answers led Herve and Oh to confirm their study's hypothesis that the perceived lack of control over one's situation could be a precursor for quiet quitting. The collaborators published their findings in the study titled Quiet Quitting in Times of Uncertainty: Definition and Relationship with Perceived Control , which appeared in the journal Human Resource Management on June 1, 2025.
Uncertainty, such as periods of political turmoil, economic instability, health or climate crises —can diminish individuals' perception of control over their environment. That could explain why the phenomenon of quiet quitting has re-emerged in the post-pandemic era — it coincided
with a significant decline in employees' perceived control over their circumstances. "The pandemic represented an aggregate shock to one's perception of control," says Herve. "There was a lot of uncertainty."
The authors also find evidence that the association between low perceived control and high quiet quitting can be explained through two channels: on one side, a high sense of replaceability; and on the other side reduced affective commitment to the employer.
The authors point out that the relationship between perceived control and quiet quitting is complex. While lower perceived control is strongly associated with quiet quitting, the precise mechanisms and causal pathways remain an important area for future research. Understanding how feelings of replaceability, diminished affective commitment, or other psychological processes translate a loss of control into quiet quitting will require further investigation.
The collaborators also think that quiet quitting behaviors can be reduced. When people feel that they have a voice, some autonomy, and that their contributions matter, they're less likely to scale back to the bare minimum, Oh explains. "That doesn't just mean giving employees more tasks or perks — it's about creating conditions where they feel their work has impact, their input is valued, and they're not easily replaceable," she clarifies. "Managers can take small steps, like involving employees in decision-making, clarifying how their work connects to the bigger picture, or giving them ownership over meaningful projects." Those signals of agency and trust can go a long way in preventing quiet quitting, authors say.
Herve and Oh are excited about being able to conduct this interdisciplinary research at Stevens, which encourages cross-disciplinary projects and collaborations. "Justine studies economics, and my work is in consumer psychology and marketing, which are pretty different disciplines," says Oh. "But because of the multidisciplinary nature of our school, we were able to join forces on such an interesting project."
About Stevens Institute of Technology
Stevens is a premier, private research university situated in Hoboken, New Jersey. Since our founding in 1870, technological innovation has been the hallmark of Stevens' education and research. Within the university's three schools and one college, more than 8,000 undergraduate and graduate students collaborate closely with faculty in an interdisciplinary, student-centric, entrepreneurial environment. Academic and research programs spanning business, computing, engineering, the arts and other disciplines actively advance the frontiers of science and leverage technology to confront our most pressing global challenges. The university continues to be consistently ranked among the nation's leaders in career services, post-graduation salaries of alumni and return on tuition investment.
