Ethical Leadership and Workplace Disengagement: A Quantitative Study of Quiet Quitting and Quiet Firing in a U.S. Workforce

June 19, 2026

Ethical Leadership and Workplace Disengagement: A Quantitative Study of Quiet Quitting and Quiet Firing in a U.S. Workforce

James Herbert Herring | 2026

Abstract

The postpandemic workplace has surfaced a quiet crisis: employees disengaging without resigning and managers nudging out unwanted staff without formal termination. This quantitative study investigated whether ethical leadership, measured across three dimensions of care, critique, and justice, bears a measurable relationship to these behaviors, known as quiet quitting (QQ) and quiet firing (QF). A sample of 543 fully employed U.S. adults completed the Ethical Leadership Questionnaire (ELQ; Langlois et al., 2014) and the QQ/QF scale (Anand et al., 2024), using both instruments in a U.S. context for the first time to evaluate relationships with excellent reliability (α = .888–.942). Regression analyses revealed that the ethic of care rooted in the relational attentiveness that servant leadership theory and biblical tradition alike identify as foundational to honorable leadership was the only ELQ dimension that uniquely predicted lower QQ and QF when the shared variance among dimensions was properly partitioned. The ethic of critique and ethic of justice carried positive associations with both outcomes, suggesting that structural and advocacy-focused ethical leadership, while valuable, does not substitute for the day-to-day relational investment that employees experience as genuine care. A notable subgroup pattern among military veterans, who reported markedly higher QQ and QF and showed a complete reversal in ELQ correlations compared to nonveterans, raised important questions about role identity and survey framing in ethical leadership research. The findings call organizations back to a leadership model grounded in human dignity, relational trust, and the kind of wholehearted stewardship described in Colossians 3:23, one where employees bring their full effort because their leaders have first demonstrated care for them as persons, not merely as performers.

Keywords: quiet quitting, quiet firing, ethical leadership, ethics of care, servant leadership, employee disengagement, postpandemic workplace, military veterans, organizational ethics

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