The Great Resignation: Has quitting become too 'cool'?

Millions of workers have quit throughout the past several years. In ways, resigning has become glamorous – though that’s not necessarily a good thing.

When organisational behaviour professor Anthony Klotz coined the term “the Great Resignation” in 2021, he only meant to comment on a trend. Now Klotz wonders if he created, to some extent, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Quitting has gone viral – both online and in real life. In the US, for instance, January data form the US Bureau of Labour Statistics showed nearly 49 million workers quit their jobs in 2021, and more than 50 million workers resigned in 2022. 

And some surveys show many of those who didn’t quit their jobs are still thinking about it: according to LinkedIn data from a poll of 2,000 workers, nearly three-quarters of Gen Zers and two-thirds or millennials are thinking about quitting this year. Older generations are also contemplating resignations, including 55% of Gen Xers and a third of Baby Boomers.

And while departing workers cite lots of reasons for turning in papers – a desire for more flexibility, money or benefits, or to leave bad company culture – there’s also the idea that quitting begets quitting. Researchers coined an effect called turnover contagion to describe a phenomenon in which once one person resigns, the probability of their colleagues following suit increases – according to one report, as many as 25%. With resignation numbers dominating headlines, says Klotz, the effect has spread rapidly through the working world.

In some ways, says Klotz, the “coolness factor” of leaving a job can be empowering for workers. “Many of us felt a bit powerless over the years of the pandemic, and even the years prior to it,” he says. “Resigning from your job can be an empowering moment.”

He continues, “During our relationship with our employer, the employer has the power. We need a pay cheque, so we put up with things that the employer wants us to do, even if we don’t want to. Once you start to think about quitting, that power dynamic starts to shift. And that’s really intoxicating and appealing. When you start to think, ‘I don’t need this anymore. I could do what my co-worker did and go work at this other organization,’ it’s a surge of power’.”

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That’s tempting, says Klotz, because “it feels liberating. It feels freeing”. And when workers are constantly reading news stories about people quitting, or even seeing viral videos of them doing it, he says, “it can be difficult to resist following in that”.

Prior to its virality, says Klotz, “quitting has been sort of a taboo topic, something you navigate in isolation. It was kind of a secretive process. The past few years there’s been this wave of people feeling more comfortable talking about it”.

But it’s not all bright side. The trendiness of quitting can overshadow the fact that leaving a job is hard for many people. 

For instance, Klotz says one of the downsides of how public quitting has become is that people get the sense that this is a fairly quick and easy decision. That could lead them to make a knee-jerk call to quit, rather than making a measured choice. If everyone’s doing it, it seems easy to do, says Klotz, “when of course, it's one of the biggest career decisions that you can make”.

Caitlin Porter, an assistant professor of management at The University of Memphis, US, and co-author of a recent research review on turnover contagion, points out that discourse on the quitting trend rarely talks about how complicated it actually is. “Do you know what it's like to quit an employer? If you live in a metro area, maybe there's another employer you could go to, but if not, maybe you're actually moving your family,” she says. 

Starting a new role isn’t simple, either. “It often takes at least six months to a year to get up to speed and build relationships that you need to be effective in that role,” continues Porter. “Your whole life gets disrupted. When you started a new job, it's actually one of the most stressful times. It's so much work. It's so hard.”

The new-found glamour of quitting can also be alluring to the wrong people, adds Porter. Those most susceptible to quitting contagion are workers who are less “embedded” in their jobs – often younger or “low-tenure” employees in other demographics – who may not really be in the best position to quit.

And even if a new job offers better pay, flexibility or other benefits, moving around frequently can make it harder to climb the ladder. The experts say if workers quit before they ‘should’ – meaning they’ve done enough in their current job to benefit them in the next one, or at least been there long enough to earn a solid reference – they may stunt their careers.

That can be especially damaging for already-marginalized groups, such as women and people of colour, who often already “don't ascend to the same levels in organizations as authority group members”, says Porter. That’s due in part, she adds, to the fact that those same groups have the highest turnover rates. It’s an issue only exacerbated by the quitting trend.

Although he likely played a part in kicking off the high-profile nature of quitting, Klotz urges workers to resist quitting because it’s the ‘cool’ thing to do at the moment. Rather than seeing a job transition as a simple shift, he says, it should be viewed as a major life change – because it is one.

“In some ways, there's overlap between resigning and breaking up a long-term relationship in your personal life,” he says. “It's complicated, it's emotional and you don't really know how you're going to feel about it until you're past it. It’s hard to predict how it'll all turn out.”