The phrase “quiet quitting” spread across social media in the wake of the pandemic, describing employees who stay in their jobs but do only what’s strictly required. For managers, the behavior can be difficult to spot and even harder to reverse. For researchers, a bigger question has lingered: what actually pushes workers into this state of minimal effort in the first place?
A new study published in Frontiers in Psychology points to a specific culprit: authoritarian leaders. The research traces how domineering management styles wear employees down through burnout, and how a workplace culture that pressures people to show up even when sick makes the problem worse.
The question behind the research
Bowen Shan and Xiu Jin of Gachon University in South Korea set out to examine the psychological chain that connects harsh, control-oriented bosses to disengaged employees. Prior work had already documented that quiet quitting hurts organizations by lowering morale and productivity. But less was known about what triggers it, and almost none of the existing research had focused on China, where hierarchical management styles are more common and culturally accepted.
The authors focused on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in China, arguing that these firms provide a fitting setting. Compared with large corporations, SMEs tend to have fewer layers of hierarchy, more centralized decision-making, and leaders who often rely on directive control to keep operations running under tight resource constraints. That structure, the researchers argue, makes authoritarian leadership more likely to surface, and its effects more visible.
What authoritarian leadership looks like
Authoritarian leadership, as described in the study, is a management style built on strict control, unilateral decision-making, and an expectation of unquestioning obedience from subordinates. These leaders tend to restrict autonomy, monitor employees closely, dismiss input from their teams, and rely on criticism or punishment when expectations aren’t met.
Drawing on a framework called conservation of resources theory, which holds that people are motivated to protect their limited psychological and emotional resources, the researchers reasoned that working under such a leader would steadily drain those resources. Employees who feel their energy is being depleted without replenishment tend to protect what’s left by pulling back on effort.
The study also drew on self-determination theory to explain a second factor: involuntary presenteeism. That’s the situation in which employees feel forced to show up for work even when they’re sick or exhausted, driven by fear of penalties, judgment, or falling behind rather than genuine motivation.
How the study was conducted
The researchers collected survey data from 363 employees working across a range of industries at Chinese SMEs. The online survey, distributed through the platform Wenjuanxing over about 10 days in late March and early April 2025, asked participants to rate their experiences on established scales measuring four things: how authoritarian they perceived their leader to be, how burned out they felt, how much they engaged in quiet quitting behaviors, and how often they felt compelled to work while unwell.
The sample was roughly split between men and women, skewed toward younger and mid-career workers, and included employees with varying levels of education and tenure. Statistical techniques were used to test whether the variables were connected in the predicted sequence and whether involuntary presenteeism changed the strength of those connections.
What the analysis revealed
The results supported each link in the proposed chain. Employees who reported working under more authoritarian leaders also reported higher levels of job burnout. Those higher burnout levels, in turn, were associated with a greater tendency toward quiet quitting behaviors, such as doing only the minimum required work and offloading tasks onto colleagues when possible.
Authoritarian leadership was also directly linked to quiet quitting, but the analysis showed that a substantial portion of its effect ran through burnout. In other words, the researchers describe burnout as the psychological middle step: controlling leaders drain employees emotionally and cognitively, and that depletion is what shows up later as disengagement.
The involuntary presenteeism finding added another layer. When employees felt strong pressure to attend work despite illness or fatigue, the link between burnout and quiet quitting became stronger. Workers who were already running low on emotional resources and who also couldn’t step away to recover were the most likely to retreat into minimum-effort mode. When presenteeism pressure was lower, burnout still predicted quiet quitting, but less powerfully.
How the researchers interpret the pattern
Shan and Jin argue that quiet quitting isn’t best understood as laziness or a generational quirk. Instead, they frame it as a resource-conservation strategy: when employees feel their psychological reserves being drained by a demanding boss and can’t recover because they’re expected to keep showing up regardless, cutting back on effort becomes a way to protect what remains.
The authors also situate their findings in the Chinese cultural context. In settings where hierarchical authority is more accepted, they suggest, employees may be less likely to openly push back against controlling leaders and more likely to express their frustration through quieter forms of withdrawal.
Practical takeaways for organizations
The researchers outline several steps that firms, particularly SMEs, might consider based on the pattern they identified. Leadership development programs that steer managers away from purely directive, control-based approaches could reduce the initial pressure that starts the burnout cycle. Tools such as 360-degree feedback and coaching, they suggest, can help managers recognize when their style tips into authoritarianism.
The authors also point to attendance policies as an area worth revisiting. Because feeling forced to work while sick amplified the effect of burnout in their data, they argue that flexible sick leave, non-punitive absence policies, and explicit signals from leadership that recovery is acceptable could weaken that amplifying effect. Regular check-ins, workload monitoring, and access to counseling or employee assistance programs are offered as ways to catch burnout before it hardens into disengagement.
Important caveats
The study has limitations that shape how far its findings can be stretched. It relied on a cross-sectional design, meaning all the data was collected at a single point in time. That makes it impossible to definitively establish that authoritarian leadership causes burnout, which then causes quiet quitting; the study can only show that these variables move together in the predicted pattern. The authors acknowledge that longitudinal or experimental research would be needed to pin down the direction of influence.
All measures also came from employees’ self-reports, which can inflate connections between variables that are closely related in people’s minds. And because the sample was drawn entirely from Chinese SMEs, the researchers note that cultural factors such as collectivism and acceptance of hierarchical authority may shape how these dynamics play out. Whether the same pattern would appear with the same strength in Western firms, in larger companies, or in different industries is an open question.
The authors also focused on burnout as the single psychological process linking leadership to quiet quitting. Other mechanisms, such as perceived unfairness, eroded trust, or feeling that one’s autonomy is under threat, could plausibly play a role and remain to be tested.
