Engagement to Quiet Quitting: The Workplace Behavior Life Cycle and the Re-stabilization of the Effort Bargain

Workplace concepts frequently gain rapid prominence in organizational and public discussions before gradually losing visibility, even though the underlying behaviors they describe continue to persist. Existing research has typically examined such concepts as discrete phenomena, offering limited explanation for the recurring processes through which workplace behavioral labels emerge, diffuse, become contested, and eventually fade from attention. Addressing this gap, this paper develops the Workplace Behavior Life Cycle (WBLC), a conceptual framework explaining the lifecycle dynamics of workplace behavioral concepts. The framework is developed through a comparative analysis of two contrasting cases: employee engagement, an academically developed construct that became institutionalized through managerial practice, and quiet quitting, a worker-generated label that rapidly diffused through digital platforms before giving way to successor terms. Drawing on management fashion theory, labor process theory, and discourse-oriented perspectives, the paper proposes a six-stage cycle consisting of latency, naming, amplification, institutional response, concept fatigue, and retirement or discursive back grounding. The paper makes three principal contributions. First, it extends management fashion theory by incorporating both management-generated and employee-generated workplace concepts within a unified framework. Second, it introduces the concept of discursive back grounding to explain how workplace concepts may remain institutionally embedded despite losing intellectual momentum. Third, it proposes that workplace behavioral concepts tend to converge toward the re-stabilization of the effort bargain on terms favorable to management, regardless of their origin. The WBLC contributes to organizational behavior, human resource management, and the sociology of management knowledge by providing a general framework for understanding the emergence, diffusion, and containment of workplace behavioral concepts.