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Why 'rage quitting' is all the rage
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(Image credit: Getty)
Angry truck driver
By Christine Ro8th September 2021
Walking out of a job in anger can seem extreme – but there are often
powerful motivations for doing it.
I

It was sweltering inside the nightclub where Alexander was DJing, in
the US state of Virginia. Though it was more than 40°C outside, the
club’s air conditioning was broken. It felt extra sticky and humid
because the club was hosting a special event: a Pokemon-themed foam
party, where upwards of 400 clubbers were frolicking in suds.

“I literally had ice packs on my neck in order to not pass out,”
remembers Alexander, now 35, of the 2016 event. The heat was also
damaging his gear, and he’d had enough. Over the microphone, so
everyone could hear, he berated the club owner for lying about fixing
the air conditioning and for the equipment-frying conditions. “I’m
done,” he said, then stormed out.

Many of us have fantasised about leaving a bad job in a similarly
dramatic fashion. Yet far from throwing a temper tantrum, 'rage
quitting' is a sign of serious flaws in a workplace: from lax health
and safety standards to exploitative working conditions and abusive
managers. The Covid-19 pandemic has only intensified the stressors that
can lead employees to quit on the spot. But as rage quitting tends to
be the culmination of a series of work issues, employers can avoid
being left in the lurch by paying attention to the warning signs –
before an employee drops the mic on their way out the door.

What a ‘rage quit’ looks like

The idea of angrily walking out of a job has been around since long
before the phenomenon became celebrated in pop culture, like the 1970s
country music anthem Take This Job and Shove It; and before [25]video
gamers started using the term ‘rage quitting’ in the 1980s to refer to
angrily exiting a frustrating game.

Though rage quitting can look and feel impulsive, dissatisfaction with
a job tends to build up over time, until an incident triggers the
actual resignation. And having a safe space to land – such as an
abundance of job options, another source of income (like unemployment
insurance) or an upcoming opportunity (like graduate school) – can make
it easier to pull that trigger.
Angry departures are generally the culmination of a series of tensions,
rather than just one bust-up (Credit: Getty)

Angry departures are generally the culmination of a series of tensions,
rather than just one bust-up (Credit: Getty)

These patterns exist in some form across job roles and industries, but
will take different shape in different contexts. There’s a lack of
statistics about rage quitting, but Peter Hom, a turnover expert at
Arizona State University in the US, points out that in Germany, for
instance, employees of large companies get penalised for quitting
without notice. The US has more [26]at-will employment, so it would
make sense for rage quitting to be more common there.

Sajeet Pradhan, who researches organisational behaviour at the Indian
Institute of Management Tiruchirappalli, says compared to the US and
Europe, India “is more culturally tolerant (unfortunately) towards
abuse at work”, due to “power distance or the upbringing which has
conditioned us to respect people in authoritative positions”. In India,
according to Pradhan, “rage quitting is generally witnessed among
highly-skilled jobs and the millennials”.

In general, says Nita Chhinzer, who researches strategic human-resource
management at the University of Guelph in Canada, “higher-educated
people are more likely to quit, because they think that their skills
are highly transferrable and generalisable”. Yet those in
lower-skilled, precarious employment can often quit with little notice.
Peter Hom refers to people working for export-driven factories in China
and Mexico: “It’s like musical chairs – they jump from job to job.”

And although young workers are sometimes perceived as flaky, “the truth
is that before they have a sunk cost, for a sunk investment in the
organisation, they’re making a decision about what’s best for them”,
adds Chhinzer. It makes sense that they would quit an ill-fitting job
more spontaneously.

This doesn’t mean that leaving in the heat of the moment is always
logical. Chhinzer says that with “rage quitting, they’re not really
stopping to make those rational decisions about something and just
thinking about what are their options”. Fed-up employees might
overestimate their ability to secure another job.

What lies beneath a rage quit

Though there are many reasons to leave an unsatisfying job, there are
certain recurrent patterns that lead to spontaneous resignations.

One of the most common reasons is poor management. Abusive supervision
can [27]lead to emotional exhaustion. When managers fail to address
employees’ repeated concerns, the explosive result may be those
employees quitting in outrage. Bad management is often linked to other
reasons people rage quit, like scope creep, harsh schedules, overwork
and dismissal of safety concerns.
Feeling unsafe in the workplace – for whatever reason – is a powerful
motivator for an impromptu resignation (Credit: Getty)

Feeling unsafe in the workplace – for whatever reason – is a powerful
motivator for an impromptu resignation (Credit: Getty)

Sarah experienced all of these in a recent three-month stint as a
cashier at a small grocery store in Michigan, US. The 24-year-old had
moved in with her parents for the summer. She’d intended to work only
part time as she prepared to leave for graduate school in Toronto, but
the short staffing and intense manager demands soon had her working
full time.

It was also clear that employee safety wasn’t a priority. The only
young woman on staff, Sarah felt unsafe in multiple ways: drunk
customers were sometimes belligerent, most people refused to wear masks
and she was usually the sole employee in the shop.

The final straw was when a customer began to stalk her. Sarah asked her
manager to move the employee rota from its public position in the shop,
where any customer could see when she would be working, to a private
space. Not only did the manager refuse, but she also shouted at Sarah
for mentioning the stalker. “My boss just immediately went for the gut.
She was just like, ‘You need to be an adult. Why aren’t you being an
adult about this?’ She repeated that so many times,” says Sarah.

She quit in that phone call, a month before the job would have come to
an end. “I felt so bad because I really wanted to put two weeks
[notice] in … But then the more I thought about it, and how little they
had helped me and worked on the situation, I was just like, this is not
worth my time or my safety.”

Sarah had seen the role as a temporary job and, while she was shaken up
after rage quitting, she wasn’t in dire financial need. “I definitely
think if it had been my dream job, I would have taken different steps,”
reflects Sarah. She says that she would have been less likely to quit
spontaneously “if it was a job that was already valuing me… if it was a
job that was actually like a career”.

With rage quitters, ill treatment on one side breeds ill treatment on
the other. After her manager failed to consider her safety, Sarah
decided against serving out a notice period. Chhinzer refers to social
exchange theory: “The way you treat me dictates the way I treat you.”
If a manager is switching schedules at the last minute, insisting that
employees work extra hours or refusing to allow time off for
bereavement, then employees are more apt to reciprocate with limited
communication and little notice as well.

The Covid intensifier

Some of these employee pressures have been magnified during the
Covid-19 pandemic. Chhinzer says that in 2020, quit rates generally
went down as people held onto jobs. But resignations have surged in
2021, so that “managers and organisations and HR departments are really
worried about retaining talent”. Yet as Sarah’s experience shows, that
worry doesn’t always translate into better safeguarding of employees,
particularly in low-paid roles.

Safety has been a common catalyst for client-facing employees to quit in a
rage

Indeed, safety has been a common catalyst for client-facing employees
to quit in a rage. A [28]nurse whose colleagues spread misinformation
about vaccines; a [29]restaurant worker whose managers hide the fact
that Covid has been spreading among staff; or a [30]retail worker
worried about transmitting the virus to a vulnerable relative – all
have left jobs semi-impetuously during the pandemic.

Business researchers were already exploring [31]‘death awareness at
work’ before the pandemic. But Covid-19 has brought another dimension
to this workplace anxiety. For those who rage quit, especially those
with high ‘death anxiety’, the ‘rage’ component “may be more likely to
be triggered by the fact that employers fail to provide enough safety
measures to protect their employees’ health”, notes Rui (Hammer) Zhong,
a PhD student at the University of British Columbia in Canada, who
researches the dark side of workplaces. (This impassioned rage response
is in contrast to another form of death awareness that Zhong and his
colleagues [32]have researched – death reflection, or ‘calm quitting’
on realising how short life is.)

As Chihinzer comments, “People are exiting not just based on poor
treatment at work from managers and co-workers; they’re also exiting
based on the situation at work,” such as a requirement to return to the
workplace. “Those weren’t considerations before.”

Alternatives to rage quitting

For someone tempted to rage quit, it can be useful to gain perspective
on [33]what lies beneath the anger, beyond the immediate gratification
of socking it to a bad boss.

It’s also useful to consider why more people don’t rage quit. Stories
of overworked employees thumbing their noses at poor bosses are
satisfying and sometimes inspiring. But of course it’s distressing to
[34]quit without a back-up plan.
Managers should look out for warning signs and intervene before
tensions escalate, if they don't want employees to leave (Credit:
Getty)

Managers should look out for warning signs and intervene before
tensions escalate, if they don't want employees to leave (Credit:
Getty)

Alexander was lucky to not depend on his DJ gig, as his main job was as
a scientist. “It would have definitely been more difficult to walk away
if I didn’t have another job already,” he notes. And not everyone can
afford to leave a soul-crushing job, or to depart with the final pay
cheque in limbo, so it’s not always helpful for those who’ve landed on
their feet to urge others to quit a terrible job immediately.

Alibel sees this all too often among her fellow Venezuelan migrants in
Argentina, who don’t always have the legal or financial status to
easily switch jobs. When she arrived in Buenos Aires in 2019, the first
job she took was selling cars over the phone. It didn’t take long to
realise that this was an illegal operation and Alibel, now 28, quit
straight away. She didn’t lose any pay because the job was entirely
commission-based: “If you didn’t sell anything, you didn’t gain a
cent.” Yet while there are plenty of accounts of people rage quitting
other shady jobs, not everyone can afford to take a moral stand.

Overall, [35]quitting stigma may be diminishing due to the Great
Resignation – although the departures of some employees with back-up
options [36]can make the situation harder for colleagyes left behind.
Ultimately, though, it’s up to employers to improve working conditions.
“If employers pay decent wages and good benefits, that inhibits
leaving,” says Hom.

Chhinzer says that among organisations focused on retention, it helps
to be proactive, for example with weekly check-ins, perks like tuition
subsidies or Fridays off in the summer. Hom and his colleagues
recommend that employers [37]pay more attention to ‘pre-quitting
behaviours’, for instance by implementing stay interviews with existing
employees (and not just exit interviews with departing employees).

If an employee does rage quit, this should be a wake-up call to the
employer. Six months after Alexander left the overheated club clutching
his DJ equipment, he reconciled with the owner and went back. But the
next year he walked out again, following more broken promises and
unsafe working conditions. “That was the last time I DJed outside of my
own house. Just was fed up with the whole thing.”
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