“You Pretend to Pay Me; I Pretend to Work”A Multi‐Level Exploration of Quiet Quitting in the Greek Context

Andri Georgiadou, Paraskevas Vezyridis, Νiki Glaveli•View original

OverviewBalancedalloy voice

Quiet quitting gets talked about like a fad, but it's more precise than that. It isn't disengagement in a sloppy, hand-waving sense, and it isn't the same as plotting your exit. It's a choice to draw a hard line: do what the job formally requires, keep your seat, and stop pouring in the extra, discretionary effort that used to be taken for granted. As Dora Pevec put it, it's a redefinition of the relationship with work. It's not giving up. It's setting boundaries. Greece is a revealing place to watch this boundary-setting unfold. You've got a country with deep collectivist traditions—loyalty, sacrifice, and the family-like firm—meeting a decade of austerity, a pandemic, and a global conversation about balance and well-being. Add one more twist: in July 2024, Greek policy opened the door for some twenty-four hour businesses to move to six-day schedules, up to forty-eight hours a week, just as many other countries are flirting with four-day weeks. That's a head-on collision between old expectations and new ideals. Into that collision step three researchers—Georgiadou, Vezyridis, and Glaveli—who set out to map quiet quitting in Greece across three levels: the macro context of institutions and norms, the meso world of organizations and practices, and the micro experience of individual coping. Think of it as contextual strategic human resource management with a multilevel lens. Instead of assuming disengagement lives only inside a person's head, they ask how national shocks, company routines, and private decisions knit together into a process. Their evidence is qualitative but not casual. Between October 2023 and March 2024, they ran semi-structured interviews with fifteen human resources, or HR, managers across sectors like food manufacturing, shipping, consultancy, utilities, finance, private education, and advertising. Most worked in small HR teams; most had postgraduate training in HR; and every one of them reported seeing quiet quitting in their workforces. Interviews happened in Greek over video, averaged about forty-one minutes, and totaled roughly ten hours of material. The team recruited through Greece's professional HR association to target people who'd actually wrestled with the issue, paused after ten interviews when new ideas stopped surfacing, then added five more to test saturation. They coded inductively using the interpretive playbook—Klein and Myers for the philosophy, Strauss and Corbin for the iterative build—and resolved translation and coding decisions by consensus. It's the kind of careful, information-rich sample Malterud and colleagues argue you want when you're theorizing a process rather than projecting a prevalence. The trade-off is the usual one: managerial voices dominate, hospitality and other big Greek sectors aren't in the room, and we're talking one country. Start at the top, the macro level. The people they spoke with describe Greece as standing in two streams at once. In one stream, global narratives—amplified by COVID-era reconsiderations of life—push for well-being, flexibility, and a humane pace. In the other, you have entrenched hierarchies, underdeveloped HR systems, and the lingering discipline of crisis: tightened budgets, provisional promises, and the constant message to do more with less. When a new law signals longer weeks for some operations, it sharpens the contrast with the rest of the world's talk of shorter ones. HR managers end up translating between these currents every day. That translation is fraught because it hits a nerve: the psychological contract. Not the literal contract you sign, but the bundle of expectations you carry—about fair pay, development, recognition, and respect for life outside the office. When that bundle feels broken, the interviews suggest a pattern. The first response isn't rage. It's recalculation. One manager quoted a line that could be a national proverb of disillusion: "You pretend to pay me; I pretend to work." In other words, if the organization slips on its side of the implicit deal, employees even the score by pulling back what's easiest to withhold—discretionary effort—while avoiding an open fight or a risky exit in a tight market. Generations color this story. Younger workers, said one participant, "don't want to hear about shifts, weekends. They put themselves and their well-being first." Older cohorts were described as more stoic, more inclined to ride out strain and keep faith with the firm. That split doesn't mean young people are lazy and older people are saints. It means the same institutional tensions land differently depending on what you think work should be for. Now zoom down to the meso level, where lofty norms become daily routines. A theme runs through the interviews like a backbone: weak HR architecture. Roles are vague, decision rights are unclear, and the HR function itself struggles for authority. Pay and progression aren't transparent. People suspect that raises and promotions depend on who you know more than what you do. When employees don't see a fair system, they stop volunteering extra. It's not mysterious; it's rational. Job design often pushes the same way. Repetitive tasks, tight controls, and little say over how to do the work sap autonomy and make it easier to do the minimum. In blue-collar technical roles, some respondents said, people tend to vote with their feet because the external labor market is more fluid. In office roles, especially where networks and tenure still matter, the quieter move is to stay and sand down your effort. Leadership amplifies or eases that drift. Many accounts point to command-and-control managers who micromanage and rely on surveillance, sticks, and small carrots. That's a short-term way to get compliance; it's a long-term way to flatten motivation. Inclusive leadership—the kind that shares information, invites voice, and trusts people with autonomy—shows up as a counterexample in the narratives, but it's rarer. When managers do create psychological safety and make contributions visible and fair, quiet quitting has less room to harden into habit. And then, at the micro level, the process comes into focus. The spark is breach perception: I did a hundred things right and no one noticed; I messed up once and they pounced. I was told growth would follow effort; it didn't. Those appraisals carry emotion—anger, resentment, a sense of being taken for granted. If they pile up, people start redefining what "being a good employee" means. Instead of equating goodness with going the extra mile, they equate it with doing the role well and guarding their energy. That is textbook psychological contract theory playing out in everyday language. Energy matters here. The study leans on what we know about burnout to explain why withdrawal can feel less like a choice than a survival move. When you're juggling high demands at work with caregiving and a broader polycrisis—economic shocks and public health stress—it drains your psychological reserves. Discretionary effort is the first thing to go because it's the only thing you can give up without violating the literal job description. In that depleted state, quiet quitting becomes a way to conserve what's left rather than a statement of apathy. Crucially, people don't narrate this as failure. They do identity work to keep their self-respect intact. One voice framed it as a principled stance—resistance to a non-meritocratic game. Another reframed it as strategy: "Quiet quitting pushes me to always find other creative alternatives outside of work." That's self-affirmation in action. You redraw the boundaries of who you are at work so that withholding extra isn't a moral blemish; it's coherence with your values. Generational currents surface again at this level. Younger employees are more likely, in these accounts, to articulate the boundary clearly and to walk if it's crossed. Yet even some of them, within Greek cultural constraints, opt for the quieter route. Overt exits are costly; subtle recalibration is safer. Over time, as more people normalize the recalibration, organizations feel it at the meso level: fewer citizenship behaviors and less discretionary glue holding teams together. That's how micro coping feeds back into culture. Put those pieces together and you get the process model the authors propose. It's a cycle. Macro forces—global talk of balance, local hierarchies, austerity's aftertaste, and a policy nudge toward longer weeks—set up mismatches between what people expect and what they get. Those mismatches show up as psychological contract breaches. Breaches trigger emotional exhaustion, which daily practices like micromanagement and opaque rewards keep alive. Exhausted and disillusioned, people protect their identity and energy by stripping out the extras while still doing the job. The behavior then becomes part of the backdrop, teaching newcomers what "normal" looks like and making it easier for the next breach to lead to the same move. It's not a one-off reaction; it's a dynamic equilibrium. If that's the loop, what breaks it? The study isn't a field experiment, but the interviews point to levers that are painfully straightforward. Build real HR systems—transparent compensation, credible performance management, and visible career paths that aren't captive to networks. Clarify roles and decision rights so people know what they own and where they can exercise judgment. Open channels for voice so upward feedback isn't career suicide, and follow through on what you hear. Redesign jobs to increase autonomy and task variety rather than squeezing for control. And develop leaders who can swap command-and-control for inclusion and trust. Even within extended-hours frameworks, there's room to give people predictability, flexibility, and real say in how the hours are used. When justice and autonomy rise, discretionary effort tends to come back. You can hear the objections already: it's easier said than done, especially in a system shaped by long traditions and recent shocks. That's fair. And the researchers are careful about boundaries. This is a small, nonrandom, single-country sample of HR managers, recruited through a professional association. Hospitality and some regional contexts are missing. The point isn't to claim that a specific percent of Greek employees are quiet quitting. It's to sketch how macro pressures, organizational routines, and individual psychology interlock in a Greek setting. The wider message travels. Quiet quitting, in this telling, isn't a moral failing of Generation Z or a passing meme. It's a coping response that becomes logical when the implicit deal frays, the work system limits voice and growth, and personal resources are thin. Fix the deal, tune the system, and the logic changes. There are two quick forward looks, clearly framed as next steps rather than done deals. First, cross-cultural comparisons could test which links in the cycle are culture-specific and which are universal—does a similar breach-to-exhaustion-to-identity path appear in countries with stronger human resource institutions or less hierarchical norms? Second, longitudinal and multi-source designs—combining employee and manager voices and tracking teams over time—could watch the cycle form and break, giving us evidence on which levers move behavior fastest. As Chen and colleagues have shown in other human resource contexts, when you can see the process in motion, interventions get sharper. But even without those studies in hand, the core takeaway is accessible. Where expectations and realities diverge, people protect themselves. In Greece, that protection is shaped by a particular mix of tradition, policy, and organizational practice. And yet the heartbeat of it—the quiet, deliberate choice to do the job, and no more, until the deal feels fair again—will sound familiar far beyond Athens.

As Dora Pevec put it, it's a redefinition of the relationship with work. It's not giving up. It's setting boundaries.

Greece is a revealing place to watch this boundary-setting unfold. You've got a country with deep collectivist traditions—loyalty, sacrifice, and the family-like firm—meeting a decade of austerity, a pandemic, and a global conversation about balance and well-being. Add one more twist: in July 2024, Greek policy opened the door for some twenty-four hour businesses to move to six-day schedules, up to forty-eight hours a week, just as many other countries are flirting with four-day weeks. That's a head-on collision between old expectations and new ideals.

Into that collision step three researchers—Georgiadou, Vezyridis, and Glaveli—who set out to map quiet quitting in Greece across three levels: the macro context of institutions and norms, the meso world of organizations and practices, and the micro experience of individual coping. Think of it as contextual strategic human resource management with a multilevel lens. Instead of assuming disengagement lives only inside a person's head, they ask how national shocks, company routines, and private decisions knit together into a process.

Their evidence is qualitative but not casual. Between October 2023 and March 2024, they ran semi-structured interviews with fifteen human resources, or HR, managers across sectors like food manufacturing, shipping, consultancy, utilities, finance, private education, and advertising. Most worked in small HR teams; most had postgraduate training in HR; and every one of them reported seeing quiet quitting in their workforces.

Interviews happened in Greek over video, averaged about forty-one minutes, and totaled roughly ten hours of material. The team recruited through Greece's professional HR association to target people who'd actually wrestled with the issue, paused after ten interviews when new ideas stopped surfacing, then added five more to test saturation. They coded inductively using the interpretive playbook—Klein and Myers for the philosophy, Strauss and Corbin for the iterative build—and resolved translation and coding decisions by consensus.

It's the kind of careful, information-rich sample Malterud and colleagues argue you want when you're theorizing a process rather than projecting a prevalence. The trade-off is the usual one: managerial voices dominate, hospitality and other big Greek sectors aren't in the room, and we're talking one country.

Start at the top, the macro level. The people they spoke with describe Greece as standing in two streams at once. In one stream, global narratives—amplified by COVID-era reconsiderations of life—push for well-being, flexibility, and a humane pace.

In the other, you have entrenched hierarchies, underdeveloped HR systems, and the lingering discipline of crisis: tightened budgets, provisional promises, and the constant message to do more with less. When a new law signals longer weeks for some operations, it sharpens the contrast with the rest of the world's talk of shorter ones. HR managers end up translating between these currents every day.

That translation is fraught because it hits a nerve: the psychological contract. Not the literal contract you sign, but the bundle of expectations you carry—about fair pay, development, recognition, and respect for life outside the office. When that bundle feels broken, the interviews suggest a pattern.

The first response isn't rage. It's recalculation. One manager quoted a line that could be a national proverb of disillusion: "You pretend to pay me;

I pretend to work." In other words, if the organization slips on its side of the implicit deal, employees even the score by pulling back what's easiest to withhold—discretionary effort—while avoiding an open fight or a risky exit in a tight market.

Generations color this story. Younger workers, said one participant, "don't want to hear about shifts, weekends. They put themselves and their well-being first." Older cohorts were described as more stoic, more inclined to ride out strain and keep faith with the firm.

That split doesn't mean young people are lazy and older people are saints. It means the same institutional tensions land differently depending on what you think work should be for.

Now zoom down to the meso level, where lofty norms become daily routines. A theme runs through the interviews like a backbone: weak HR architecture. Roles are vague, decision rights are unclear, and the HR function itself struggles for authority.

Pay and progression aren't transparent. People suspect that raises and promotions depend on who you know more than what you do. When employees don't see a fair system, they stop volunteering extra. It's not mysterious; it's rational.

Job design often pushes the same way. Repetitive tasks, tight controls, and little say over how to do the work sap autonomy and make it easier to do the minimum. In blue-collar technical roles, some respondents said, people tend to vote with their feet because the external labor market is more fluid.

In office roles, especially where networks and tenure still matter, the quieter move is to stay and sand down your effort.

Leadership amplifies or eases that drift. Many accounts point to command-and-control managers who micromanage and rely on surveillance, sticks, and small carrots. That's a short-term way to get compliance; it's a long-term way to flatten motivation.

Inclusive leadership—the kind that shares information, invites voice, and trusts people with autonomy—shows up as a counterexample in the narratives, but it's rarer. When managers do create psychological safety and make contributions visible and fair, quiet quitting has less room to harden into habit.

And then, at the micro level, the process comes into focus. The spark is breach perception: I did a hundred things right and no one noticed; I messed up once and they pounced.

I was told growth would follow effort; it didn't. Those appraisals carry emotion—anger, resentment, a sense of being taken for granted. If they pile up, people start redefining what "being a good employee" means.

Instead of equating goodness with going the extra mile, they equate it with doing the role well and guarding their energy. That is textbook psychological contract theory playing out in everyday language.

Energy matters here. The study leans on what we know about burnout to explain why withdrawal can feel less like a choice than a survival move. When you're juggling high demands at work with caregiving and a broader polycrisis—economic shocks and public health stress—it drains your psychological reserves.

Discretionary effort is the first thing to go because it's the only thing you can give up without violating the literal job description. In that depleted state, quiet quitting becomes a way to conserve what's left rather than a statement of apathy.

Crucially, people don't narrate this as failure. They do identity work to keep their self-respect intact. One voice framed it as a principled stance—resistance to a non-meritocratic game.

Another reframed it as strategy: "Quiet quitting pushes me to always find other creative alternatives outside of work." That's self-affirmation in action. You redraw the boundaries of who you are at work so that withholding extra isn't a moral blemish; it's coherence with your values.

Generational currents surface again at this level. Younger employees are more likely, in these accounts, to articulate the boundary clearly and to walk if it's crossed. Yet even some of them, within Greek cultural constraints, opt for the quieter route.

Overt exits are costly; subtle recalibration is safer. Over time, as more people normalize the recalibration, organizations feel it at the meso level: fewer citizenship behaviors and less discretionary glue holding teams together. That's how micro coping feeds back into culture.

Put those pieces together and you get the process model the authors propose. It's a cycle. Macro forces—global talk of balance, local hierarchies, austerity's aftertaste, and a policy nudge toward longer weeks—set up mismatches between what people expect and what they get.

Those mismatches show up as psychological contract breaches. Breaches trigger emotional exhaustion, which daily practices like micromanagement and opaque rewards keep alive. Exhausted and disillusioned, people protect their identity and energy by stripping out the extras while still doing the job.

The behavior then becomes part of the backdrop, teaching newcomers what "normal" looks like and making it easier for the next breach to lead to the same move. It's not a one-off reaction; it's a dynamic equilibrium.

If that's the loop, what breaks it? The study isn't a field experiment, but the interviews point to levers that are painfully straightforward. Build real HR systems—transparent compensation, credible performance management, and visible career paths that aren't captive to networks.

Clarify roles and decision rights so people know what they own and where they can exercise judgment. Open channels for voice so upward feedback isn't career suicide, and follow through on what you hear. Redesign jobs to increase autonomy and task variety rather than squeezing for control.

And develop leaders who can swap command-and-control for inclusion and trust. Even within extended-hours frameworks, there's room to give people predictability, flexibility, and real say in how the hours are used. When justice and autonomy rise, discretionary effort tends to come back.

You can hear the objections already: it's easier said than done, especially in a system shaped by long traditions and recent shocks. That's fair. And the researchers are careful about boundaries.

This is a small, nonrandom, single-country sample of HR managers, recruited through a professional association. Hospitality and some regional contexts are missing. The point isn't to claim that a specific percent of Greek employees are quiet quitting.

It's to sketch how macro pressures, organizational routines, and individual psychology interlock in a Greek setting.

The wider message travels. Quiet quitting, in this telling, isn't a moral failing of Generation Z or a passing meme. It's a coping response that becomes logical when the implicit deal frays, the work system limits voice and growth, and personal resources are thin. Fix the deal, tune the system, and the logic changes.

There are two quick forward looks, clearly framed as next steps rather than done deals. First, cross-cultural comparisons could test which links in the cycle are culture-specific and which are universal—does a similar breach-to-exhaustion-to-identity path appear in countries with stronger human resource institutions or less hierarchical norms? Second, longitudinal and multi-source designs—combining employee and manager voices and tracking teams over time—could watch the cycle form and break, giving us evidence on which levers move behavior fastest.

As Chen and colleagues have shown in other human resource contexts, when you can see the process in motion, interventions get sharper.

But even without those studies in hand, the core takeaway is accessible. Where expectations and realities diverge, people protect themselves. In Greece, that protection is shaped by a particular mix of tradition, policy, and organizational practice.

And yet the heartbeat of it—the quiet, deliberate choice to do the job, and no more, until the deal feels fair again—will sound familiar far beyond Athens.