Quiet Quitting Behavior Scale

1. Abstract

The Quiet Quitting Behavior Scale (QQBS) is a multidimensional psychometric instrument developed by Qing-lin Li, Tao Sun, and Xiang Zhang to operationalize and quantify the phenomenon of quiet quitting within occupational environments, particularly within collectivist cultural frameworks and high-stress vocational domains such as primary healthcare. Moving beyond conventional conceptualizations of occupational burnout, apathy, or explicit turnover intention, the scale conceptualizes quiet quitting as an intentional, boundary-protecting behavioral strategy wherein employees deliberately constrain their work output to formally specified contractual duties while withholding discretionary effort. The instrument comprises 15 items distributed across two distinct, theoretically grounded dimensions: Role Contraction and Behavioral Inertia (8 items) and Cognitive Collapse and Psychological Detachment (7 items).

Constructed via a comprehensive mixed-methods methodology integrating qualitative grounded theory and iterative Delphi expert consensus panels, the QQBS translates implicit coping adaptations into measurable behavioral indicators. Psychometric evaluation conducted across pilot and formal cohorts of primary healthcare professionals in China demonstrates exceptional internal consistency (overall Cronbach’s α = 0.921; subscale α = 0.874 and 0.900; split-half reliability = 0.803). Confirmatory factor analysis supported the dual-factor structural model, displaying robust goodness-of-fit indices (CFI = 0.959, IFI = 0.960, RMSEA = 0.065). Criterion-related and construct validity assessments confirmed significant, theoretically consistent correlations with measures of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and turnover intention. The QQBS offers organizational psychologists, public health administrators, and human resource management researchers an empirically validated diagnostic instrument for the early identification, monitoring, and structural remediation of covert employee disengagement.

2. Keywords

Quiet Quitting, Psychological Detachment, Occupational Health, Psychometrics, Organizational Behavior, Role Contraction, Healthcare Workers, Cognitive Dissonance, Labor Alienation, Organizational Citizenship Behavior

3. Authors

The Quiet Quitting Behavior Scale was developed and validated by a research team investigating occupational health, organizational management, and public health systems in China:

• Qing-lin Li: Co-developer, conceptualization, scale construction, and psychometric methodology.
• Tao Sun: Co-developer, investigation, methodological oversight, and structural equation modeling.
• Xiang Zhang: Principal investigator and corresponding author. Institutional correspondence: [email protected].

4. Purpose

In contemporary organizational psychology, the modern workforce landscape has witnessed a pronounced recalibration of employee-employer dynamics, catalyzed by pervasive work-related stress, institutional precariousness, and evolving conceptualizations of work–life balance. Historically, organizations have monitored employee withdrawal through traditional indices such as explicit turnover rates, absenteeism, or standardized instruments measuring generalized occupational burnout and job satisfaction. However, these metrics frequently fail to capture subtle, non-confrontational strategies of disengagement, colloquially termed “quiet quitting.” Rather than physically abandoning an organization or displaying disruptive counterproductive work behaviors, quiet quitters fulfill basic formal job specifications while consciously repudiating the culture of overwork, extra-role obligations, and uncompensated organizational sacrifice.

This measurement void is particularly acute in collectivist cultural milieus, such as mainland China, where open confrontation, direct defiance of administrative hierarchies, or abrupt job abandonment can incur severe interpersonal and social repercussions. In collectivist and highly institutionalized environments—exemplified by primary healthcare networks—workplace dissatisfaction rarely manifests as vocal protest. Instead, employees navigate structural disempowerment and chronic fatigue through nuanced, surface-compliant behavioral withdrawal. Western-derived assessment tools, or repurposed scales measuring job engagement or turnover intentions, do not fully encapsulate the behavioral mechanisms and psychological compartmentalization typical of this covert adaptation. The primary purpose of the QQBS is to provide an objective, culturally sensitive, and behaviorally anchored diagnostic tool to capture these implicit manifestations.

From an applied clinical, administrative, and research perspective, the QQBS fulfills several crucial functions:

• Early Warning Diagnostic: It enables human resource administrators, healthcare leaders, and organizational consultants to detect sub-clinical disengagement prior to explicit resignation, medical leave, or systemic operational breakdowns.
• Construct Disentanglement: It furnishes researchers with an empirical framework to clearly differentiate quiet quitting from comorbid yet distinct constructs, such as clinical depression, occupational exhaustion (burnout), and passive negligence or laziness.
• Targeted Organizational Intervention: By delineating between external behavioral contractions and internal psychological detachment, leadership can tailor structural remedies—such as revising uncompensated workloads, re-evaluating psychological contracts, and establishing supportive institutional channels—rather than deploying punitive administrative measures that exacerbate alienation.

5. Psychological Construct

The Quiet Quitting Behavior Scale operationalizes quiet quitting not as a transient affective state or chronic indolence, but as a deliberate, multidimensional coping mechanism through which an individual dynamically manages cognitive, emotional, and physical boundaries at work. The construct reflects an intentional recalibration of an employee’s psychological contract, shifting from an expansive, relational engagement characterized by spontaneous organizational citizenship to an uncompromising, transactional adherence to prescribed duties. To comprehensively capture this dynamic, the QQBS evaluates two core, interrelated dimensions comprising a total of 15 items.

Dimension 1: Role Contraction and Behavioral Inertia (8 items)

Role Contraction and Behavioral Inertia represents the externally observable behavioral facet of quiet quitting. This subscale measures the deliberate reduction of work activities strictly to the boundaries of formal job descriptions, accompanied by a systemic unwillingness to exert discretionary effort. In many modern occupational environments, organizational functionality depends heavily on extra-role behaviors, such as volunteering for emergency assignments, mentoring junior staff, answering communications outside standard working hours, and assuming uncompensated administrative burdens.

Employees scoring high on this dimension exhibit strategic boundary management. They systematically reject extra-role demands, decline requests for non-mandatory overtime, and maintain strict temporal demarcations between occupational duties and personal life. Behavioral inertia further reflects a decline in proactive problem-solving; the worker executes routine assignments with procedural compliance but consciously refrains from investing additional energy or taking innovative initiatives. Within the primary healthcare environment, this dimension manifests when practitioners fulfill basic diagnostic and care duties according to clinical guidelines but refuse additional committee duties, public health outreach campaigns, or voluntary shifts.

Dimension 2: Cognitive Collapse and Psychological Detachment (7 items)

Cognitive Collapse and Psychological Detachment addresses the subjective, internal, and psychological retreat from the vocational role. While an employee may continue to perform formal tasks adequately on the surface, their psychological connection to the organizational mission, professional identity, and collective values is fundamentally severed. This dimension encapsulates feelings of emotional disinvestment, mental distancing, and cynicism regarding the meaningfulness of one’s contribution.

Cognitive collapse reflects the breakdown of intrinsic motivation, vocational pride, and subjective aspirations within the workplace. It denotes an adaptive psychic defense mechanism: by disinvesting emotionally from organizational achievements, structural failures, or managerial appraisals, the employee insulates themselves from moral injury, professional disillusionment, and affective exhaustion. Psychological detachment in this context differs from healthy end-of-day boundary detachment, functioning instead as continuous mental withdrawal during the workday itself. Healthcare professionals high in this dimension experience professional alienation, viewing clinical duties purely as mechanical transactions rather than meaningful service, thereby shielding their remaining psychological resources from systemic workplace stressors.

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual architecture of the QQBS synthesizes two foundational theoretical paradigms in social and organizational psychology: Cognitive Dissonance Theory and Labor Alienation Theory, enriched by modern perspectives on the psychological contract and conservation of resources.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

Formulated by Leon Festinger (1957), Cognitive Dissonance Theory posits that individuals experience distressing psychological tension when confronted with incompatible cognitions, or when their core beliefs conflict directly with external behavioral demands. In high-demand professional sectors like healthcare, employees frequently enter their fields with high prosocial motivation, vocational dedication, and expectations of institutional reciprocity. However, when faced with chronic institutional exploitation, administrative overload, inadequate remuneration, and systemic understaffing, a severe cognitive discrepancy emerges between the ideal of total commitment and the empirical reality of diminished personal well-being.

To reduce this psychological tension without undergoing the severe socio-economic disruption of overt resignation, workers modify their behavioral investments. By recalibrating their psychological commitment downward—actively adopting a mindset that frames work strictly as a contractual exchange rather than a defining vocation—employees realign their cognitive expectations with institutional realities. Quiet quitting thus acts as an adaptive dissonance-reduction strategy, neutralizing guilt and restoring internal equilibrium.

Labor Alienation Theory

Rooted in classical sociological and critical theory, particularly Karl Marx’s economic and philosophical analyses of work alienation, Labor Alienation Theory provides an overarching macro-level framework for the QQBS. Alienation posits that when workers are stripped of autonomy, reduced to mechanistic instruments within bureaucratic systems, and subjected to commodified labor demands without meaningful agency, they inevitably become estranged from the work process, their products, their peers, and their creative human potential (“species-essence”).

In modern service and healthcare environments, high administrative burdens and institutional pressures can produce profound feelings of labor commodification. Quiet quitting represents the psychological and behavioral manifestation of this alienation. Rather than participating in revolutionary disruption or direct insubordination, contemporary workers in highly monitored environments enact passive resistance: they preserve bodily presence while withholding human subjectivity. The subscales of the QQBS directly measure these dimensions of estrangement through role contraction (withdrawal from the labor process) and cognitive detachment (estrangement from vocational meaning and organizational relationships).

7. Validity

The Quiet Quitting Behavior Scale was developed and validated through a multi-stage psychometric protocol to establish high content, construct, and criterion-related validity.

Content Validity

Initial item generation was conducted using grounded theory qualitative interviews with frontline primary healthcare professionals to identify authentic, culturally contextualized behavioral manifestations of disengagement. To ensure linguistic clarity, theoretical fidelity, and cultural relevance, the item pool underwent iterative evaluation through two rounds of a Delphi expert consensus procedure. Expert panels in organizational psychology, public health, and healthcare administration evaluated item relevance, representativeness, and clarity, refining the instrument to a 15-item structure that demonstrated high content validity indices across all dimensions.

Construct and Structural Validity

Construct validity was examined through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) on a pilot sample (n = 113) and confirmed via confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on an independent, representative formal sample of primary healthcare personnel in China. EFA utilizing principal component analysis with varimax rotation revealed a parsimonious two-factor solution explaining a substantial proportion of total variance, with all 15 items exhibiting high factor loadings on their intended dimensions (> 0.50) and negligible cross-loadings.

Subsequent CFA demonstrated excellent fit between the empirical covariance structure and the theoretical two-dimensional model. Key fit indices met or surpassed standard psychometric criteria:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): 0.959 (> 0.95 indicates superior model fit).
• Incremental Fit Index (IFI): 0.960 (> 0.95 indicates superior fit).
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): 0.065 (within the acceptable threshold of ≤ 0.08, confirming minimal approximation error).

Convergent and Criterion-Related Validity

The QQBS was validated against established instruments within its nomological network, specifically evaluating associations with Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) and Turnover Intention scales. In theoretical alignment with the quiet quitting construct:

• The QQBS exhibited significant negative correlations with measures of Organizational Citizenship Behavior, confirming that higher quiet quitting corresponds to a measurable decrease in discretionary, altruistic, and prosocial organizational contributions.
• The scale displayed significant positive correlations with Turnover Intention, confirming that while quiet quitting is an immediate alternative to formal resignation, it shares common underlying etiology with the psychological inclination to depart from an unsupportive workplace.

8. Reliability

The psychometric evaluation of the QQBS demonstrates high internal consistency and structural stability across multiple statistical metrics.

• Overall Internal Consistency: The total 15-item instrument demonstrated an overall Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of α = 0.921. This exceeds the recommended 0.80 benchmark for psychological instruments and confirms high internal cohesion among items.
• Subscale Alpha Coefficients:
  • Role Contraction and Behavioral Inertia (8 items): Cronbach’s α = 0.874.
  • Cognitive Collapse and Psychological Detachment (7 items): Cronbach’s α = 0.900.
• Split-Half Reliability: The split-half reliability coefficient for the complete scale was calculated at 0.803, demonstrating strong stability across bifurcated halves of the questionnaire.

Collectively, these indices indicate that the QQBS produces reliable, stable measurements across diverse cohorts of employees operating in high-demand work environments.

9. Factor Analysis

The factorial structure of the QQBS was evaluated through a sequential two-phase empirical design combining exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During the initial scale purification phase, an EFA was conducted on the pilot sample (n = 113 primary healthcare workers). Prior to factor extraction, the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity were evaluated, confirming the factorability of the correlation matrix. Using principal component analysis with orthogonal varimax rotation, factors were extracted based on eigenvalues greater than 1.0 and examination of the scree plot.

The analysis extracted two principal factors corresponding directly to the theoretical model: Factor 1 accounted for items reflecting behavioral withdrawal, refusal of extra-role tasks, and rigid role delimitation (Role Contraction and Behavioral Inertia), while Factor 2 captured items denoting emotional detachment, disengagement from vocational mission, and subjective mental distancing (Cognitive Collapse and Psychological Detachment). All retained 15 items demonstrated primary factor loadings well above the established psychometric threshold of 0.45, without problematic cross-loadings (> 0.30 on secondary factors).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

To confirm the structural stability of the two-factor model, CFA using maximum likelihood estimation was conducted on the larger, formal survey cohort. The primary evaluation focused on model fit indices, contrasting the hypothesized two-factor oblique structure against alternative plausible models (e.g., a unifactorial model representing generalized disengagement).

The confirmatory findings confirmed that the two-dimensional model provided superior fit, validating the theoretical framework that quiet quitting is composed of distinct behavioral and cognitive facets.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The structural characteristics, administration requirements, and scoring metrics of the QQBS are detailed below:

• Test Type: Standardized self-report psychometric questionnaire.
• Total Item Count: 15 items.
• Factor Structure: Multidimensional (2 correlated subscales):
  • Role Contraction and Behavioral Inertia: 8 items.
  • Cognitive Collapse and Psychological Detachment: 7 items.
• Original Language: Chinese (specifically developed and calibrated for Chinese healthcare professionals and organizational employees).
• Target Population: Primary healthcare professionals, clinical medical staff, public health practitioners, and general corporate or public sector employees experiencing occupational strain.
• Administration Mode: Available for paper-and-pencil administrative testing, enterprise survey platforms, and secure web-based digital psychological assessment systems.
• Estimated Completion Time: Approximately 5 to 8 minutes.
• Scoring and Quantification: Items are scored across a standardized multi-point continuum, with composite and subscale mean scores calculated to reflect the magnitude of disengagement. Higher aggregate scores correspond to more pronounced quiet quitting behavior, characterized by higher role restriction and cognitive detachment.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Quiet Quitting Behavior Scale was published in 2026 under peer-reviewed academic dissemination in Frontiers in Public Health. The scale was established as an academic measurement tool to facilitate empirical research into public health workforce retention, burnout epidemiology, and occupational organizational behavior.

• Test Year: 2026.
• Original Authors: Qing-lin Li, Tao Sun, and Xiang Zhang.
• Access & Permissions: The individual proprietary items of the QQBS are not published as an unrestricted public-domain instrument. Researchers, organizational psychologists, and clinical evaluators wishing to administer the official scale for empirical investigation or institutional diagnostic purposes must contact the corresponding author, Dr. Xiang Zhang (institutional email: [email protected]), to request formal permission, access to the certified Chinese questionnaire, and authorized scoring guidelines.
• Licensing Fees: Academic and non-commercial scientific research use is generally granted upon formal request without commercial licensing fees, subject to appropriate citation and adherence to ethical research standards.

12. References

Below is a curated list of academic literature and empirical studies foundational to the development, theory, and validation of the Quiet Quitting Behavior Scale:

• Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503620766
• Galanis, P., Moisoglou, I., Katsiroumpa, A., Vraka, I., Siskou, O., & Kaitelidou, D. (2023). The quiet quitting scale: Development and initial validation. AIMS Public Health, 10(4), 828–848. https://doi.org/10.3934/publichealth.2023055
• Galanis, P., Moisoglou, I., Malliarou, M., Papathanasiou, I. V., Katsiroumpa, A., & Kaitelidou, D. (2024). Nurses quietly quit their job more often than other healthcare workers: An alarming issue for healthcare services. International Nursing Review, 71(4), 850–859. https://doi.org/10.1111/inr.12931
• Kang, H. Y., & Min, A. (2023). Quiet quitting among healthcare professionals in hospital environments: A concept analysis and scoping review protocol. BMJ Open, 13(10), e077811. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2023-077811
• Li, Q.-L., Sun, T., & Zhang, X. (2026). Quiet Quitting Behavior Scale. Frontiers in Public Health, 14, 1773183. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2026.1773183
• Marx, K. (1960). Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844. Economica, 26(104), 379–382. https://doi.org/10.2307/2550890
• Patel, S., & Sharma, P. (2025). A multidimensional quiet quitting scale: Development and test of a measure of quiet quitting. PLoS ONE, 20(2), e0317624. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0317624
• Rugulies, R., Aust, B., & Madsen, I. E. H. (2023). Work-related causes of mental health conditions and interventions for their improvement in workplaces. The Lancet, 402(10410), 1368–1381. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(23)00869-3
• Serenko, A. (2024). The human capital management perspective on quiet quitting: Recommendations for employees, managers, and national policymakers. Journal of Knowledge Management, 28(1), 27–43. https://doi.org/10.1108/JKM-10-2022-0792
• Zhong, X., & Wang, Y. (2025). Modeling quiet quitting intention among academics: Mediating effect of work addiction and satisfaction. Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health, 40(1), 84–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/15555240.2024.2323636
• Zuzelo, P. R. (2023). Discouraging quiet quitting: Potential strategies for nurses. Holistic Nursing Practice, 37(3), 174–177. https://doi.org/10.1097/HNP.0000000000000583

13. Items of the Scale