This Is Not Me! How Quiet Quitting Becomes Real Resignation?

ABSTRACT This study is a narrative research that aims to reveal the meanings attributed to this experience by a teacher who resigned while showing quiet quitting. The participant, who was included in the study with the criterion sampling method, is a person who has 4 years of professional seniority and experienced quiet quitting while working as a guidance teacher in a private school. The research data were collected through semi‐structured interviews and structured grid. The participant stated that she showed intrinsic motivation, passion for work, and organizational citizenship behaviors in the first year at work. In the process of the participant's quiet quitting, work‐wage gap, increase in workload, perceiving injustice, and ignoring labor were effective. The participant stated that during the quiet quitting process, she showed behaviors of slowing down the work, absenteeism, not attending meetings and limiting her performance to her job description, as well as not feeling valued, happiness and learned helplessness. During the quiet quitting process, the participant faced quiet firing by school principal and social isolation and exclusion by her colleagues. The participant's starting to evaluate her quiet quitting behaviors as unethical and realizing that she could not realize herself led to her real resignation.