Quiet Quitting Starts With Silence: How Autonomy Threats Drive Employee Withdrawal

Quiet quitting has become one of the most talked-about phenomena in the modern workplace, but a new study from India suggests that the viral trend is far more than a social media catchphrase. According to research published in SN Social Sciences, quiet quitting is best understood as a form of psychological backlash: employees who feel that their autonomy is under siege respond not by storming out or protesting openly, but by quietly reclaiming their time and energy through reduced discretionary effort. The study, conducted by Kalvakolanu Sripathi, Ananya Gauri, KDV Prasad and Ved Srinivas, brings together organizational climate, supervisory behavior and individual psychology into a single model that traces exactly how an employee drifts from keeping their mouth shut to doing only what the job description demands.

The researchers built their framework on two complementary theories. The first is Psychological Reactance Theory, originally proposed by Jack Brehm in 1966, which holds that when people perceive a threat to their freedom, they experience a motivational state called reactance that drives them to restore that freedom, sometimes through direct resistance and sometimes through covert withdrawal. The second is the withdrawal progression perspective, developed by Farrell and Petersen in 1984, which describes how disengagement accumulates in stages: it begins with cognitive withdrawal, moves into behavioral withdrawal, and can eventually end in physical withdrawal such as turnover. Combining these lenses, the authors argue that workplace silence, the deliberate withholding of ideas, concerns and feedback, is not merely a communication problem but an early marker of cognitive disengagement that can mature into behavioral withdrawal in the form of quiet quitting.

To test this model, the team surveyed 281 employees working across Indian service sector organizations, including hospitality, retail, healthcare, telecommunications, education, customer support and IT-enabled services. Service work was a deliberate choice: these roles depend heavily on employee interaction, emotional labor, communication and extra-role effort, making them especially vulnerable when workers pull back. Participants rated their agreement with statements measuring workplace silence, work-leisure conflict, abusive supervision, quiet firing, psychological reactance, self-esteem and quiet quitting on seven-point scales drawn from established instruments. The researchers then applied exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses and covariance-based structural equation modeling using IBM SPSS and AMOS, with a statistical power analysis confirming that the sample size was sufficient to detect significant structural relationships.

The measurement model performed well. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy reached 0.906, well above the minimum threshold, and the extracted factors accounted for 81.70 percent of the variance. All standardized factor loadings exceeded 0.70, Cronbach’s alpha and composite reliability values surpassed 0.70 for every construct, and both the Fornell-Larcker criterion and the heterotrait-monotrait ratio supported discriminant validity. The structural model also showed strong fit, with a chi-square to degrees of freedom ratio of 1.769, a comparative fit index of 0.957, a standardized root mean square residual of 0.043 and a root mean square error of approximation of 0.053. Together, the model explained 38 percent of the variance in psychological reactance and 36 percent of the variance in quiet quitting, figures the authors describe as moderate explanatory power in organizational research.

The hypothesis tests told a coherent story. Workplace silence positively and significantly predicted quiet quitting, with a standardized coefficient of 0.285, suggesting that employees who routinely hold back their thoughts and concerns are already partway down the withdrawal path. Work-leisure conflict, the sense that job demands crowd out recovery and personal life, was the strongest predictor of psychological reactance at 0.301, followed by abusive supervision, defined as sustained hostile verbal and nonverbal treatment that stops short of physical abuse, at 0.258. Psychological reactance in turn significantly predicted quiet quitting at 0.171. The one hypothesis that failed was H4: quiet firing, in which managers passively withdraw support and development opportunities rather than acting hostilely, did not significantly predict psychological reactance. The authors suggest that employees interpret quiet firing as organizational neglect rather than a direct restriction of their behavioral freedom, and psychological reactance theory only applies when freedoms are explicitly threatened.

Mediation analysis added a crucial layer. The researchers modeled work-leisure conflict, abusive supervision and quiet firing as dimensions of a higher-order construct representing autonomy-threatening workplace conditions, and then tested whether psychological reactance carried their effects forward to quiet quitting. Using bias-corrected bootstrapping with 5,000 resamples, they found that the indirect effect of autonomy-threatening conditions on quiet quitting through reactance was significant, with a confidence interval excluding zero. Because the direct effect also remained significant, psychological reactance acted as a partial mediator. In plain terms, bad working conditions do not just cause disengagement mechanically; employees first interpret those conditions as threats to their autonomy, experience motivational resistance, and then act on that resistance by cutting discretionary effort while staying formally employed.

One of the study’s most intriguing findings concerns self-esteem. The analysis revealed a significant negative interaction between self-esteem and autonomy-threatening conditions in predicting reactance, meaning that employees with higher self-esteem experienced less motivational arousal when confronted with controlling or hostile workplace environments. Simple slope analysis confirmed the pattern: workers low in self-esteem showed significantly stronger reactance under autonomy-threatening conditions than their high self-esteem counterparts. The researchers interpret self-esteem as a psychological resource that buffers people against the perception that stressful work events threaten their personal worth or freedom. Employees who feel worthy and competent tend to appraise adversity as a temporary situational condition rather than a personal attack, and therefore have less need to defend themselves through withdrawal.

The practical implications are significant for any organization worried about engagement. Because silence operates as an early-warning sign, companies should build voice-supportive climates in which employees feel safe raising concerns, through confidential feedback surveys, listening sessions and psychologically safe team norms. Leadership training that emphasizes respectful supervision and autonomy-supportive management, such as giving employees discretion in how they work and involving them in decisions, can reduce the reactance that fuels quiet quitting. Addressing work-leisure conflict matters too: flexible hours, reasonable workloads and clear boundaries around after-hours communication directly target the strongest reactance driver in the model. The authors also recommend investing in employees’ psychological resources through mentoring, recognition, coaching and well-being programs, since self-esteem demonstrably softens the chain from mistreatment to disengagement.

The authors are candid about their limitations. The cross-sectional design means causality cannot be firmly established, and longitudinal or time-lagged studies would be needed to rigorously trace how cognitive withdrawal evolves into behavioral withdrawal over time. All measures were self-reported at a single point in time, although Harman’s single-factor test, variance inflation factor analysis and a common latent factor procedure suggested that common method variance was not biasing the results. The purposive sampling strategy and the exclusive focus on Indian service sector employees also limit generalizability, and the authors note that cultural values, leadership styles and employment norms may shape how autonomy threats are perceived elsewhere. Future research, they suggest, should consider additional mediators such as psychological safety, organizational identification, emotional exhaustion and trust in management.

Even with those caveats, the study delivers a message that resonates well beyond India’s service sector. Quiet quitting, in this account, is not simply laziness or a loss of motivation; it is a calculated, passive form of resistance through which employees restore a sense of control when speaking up feels unsafe or futile. Organizations that ignore the quiet signals, the withheld suggestions, the breached work-life boundaries, the disrespectful bosses, may find that their workforce has not left the building but has, psychologically, already walked out the door. The path from silence to disengagement is gradual and measurable, and the study suggests it can be interrupted long before employees decide to do only the bare minimum.

Subject of Research: Psychological mechanisms linking workplace silence and autonomy-threatening conditions to quiet quitting among Indian service sector employees

Article Title: From workplace silence to quiet quitting: the roles of psychological reactance and autonomy-threatening work conditions in service organizations

Article References: Sripathi, K., Gauri, A., Prasad, K., & Srinivas, V. (2026). From workplace silence to quiet quitting: the roles of psychological reactance and autonomy-threatening work conditions in service organizations. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 547. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01839-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01839-1

Keywords: quiet quitting, workplace silence, psychological reactance, abusive supervision, work-leisure conflict, quiet firing, self-esteem, employee disengagement, organizational psychology, service sector, structural equation modeling, India