Find the new The Conversation article by Jérôme Coullaré, PhD from the Sorbonne Business School and Olivier Meier, Professor from Université Paris-Est!
Beware of false promises. If employees seem silent, underground movements are at work that could lead to a new form of insurrection. After "quiet quitting", the phenomenon of "quiet fighting" is now emerging.
Alert for big business! The gap between ethical rhetoric and operational realities is fuelling both overt disengagement and a silent confrontation that needs to be addressed without delay. Alongside quiet quitting, popularized in 2022 as the strict limitation to the perimeter of employees' roles and efforts, a more insidious quiet fighting is taking hold, fanned by a sense of organizational injustice that Cropanzano and Folger's theoretical framework helps to dissect.
While the two phenomena have one thing in common, a deficit in interactional justice, these two dynamics do not form a continuum. Where quiet quitting lowers engagement to a minimum, quiet fighting combines prevented dissent and resigned silence. Both can be a muted preparation for a confrontation with the company. Our investigation, extending an initial work carried out as part of a doctoral thesis, establishes that perceived "organizational hypocrisy" around ethical ambitions opens a breach between companies and their employees, who now reject façade ethics.
"Fair" inequalities or illegitimate injustices
Two waves of in-depth interviews, in 2024 and 2025 using the critical incident method, were conducted with some 50 volunteer employees as part of a request made to the "quality of working life" commission of the Social and Economic Council of a major CAC 40 group. More than 120 incidents were recorded, cross-referencing the views of HR decision-makers at head office (on ethical issues and diversity/discrimination) and those of employees in a regional department closest to operations. Key result: the majority of situations today come under the heading of "interactional justice" issues, much more so than "distributive" or "procedural" justice, as conceptualized by Cropanzano & Folger.