“Quiet quitting”, a situation where an employee meets minimal effort and performance standards without exceeding expectations, has increased dramatically in recent years. Due to tight labor availability, organizations must submit to this approach in current job environments. We argue that quiet quitting is an intentional approach to managing work and non-work realities. However, outcomes are not consistent across individuals opting for this strategy. Instead, we maintain that individuals initiate quiet quitting and experience favorable results when the potential for reprimand is low. Specifically, we hypothesize that quiet quitting, in the form of self-estrangement, will lead to adverse outcomes only for individuals who failed to enact a work environment that promotes predictability and favorable coping. Using a sample of workers across various occupations and work settings, we found that enactment moderated the relationship between self-estrangement and multiple outcomes (e.g., job satisfaction, work effort, depressed work mood, citizenship, and job performance). Specifically, high estrangement workers who reported low enactment experience harmful consequences across all outcomes. Conversely, high estrangement - high enactment workers reported no ill effects for depressed mood and job satisfaction and improvements in effort, citizenship, and job performance. We provide implications of these results for science and practice, limitations, and research avenues from this study.
