Read the passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 3...

Quiet Quitting

A team can look healthy on paper while something inside it is quietly thinning out. The dashboards stay green, deadlines are met, and meetings still end with polite jokes. Yet the energy that used to spill over into the work, the extra draft, the extra check, the extra care, begins to disappear. People do not storm out or slam laptops shut. They stay. [I] They deliver. They simply stop reaching beyond what is written, because beyond what is written has started to feel like a trap.

You can see it in the small moments. Messages that once got instant replies now wait until office hours. Volunteers for “quick favours” become rare. The same people who used to mentor juniors or rescue messy documents now keep their heads down and finish their own lane. [II] It is not laziness so much as budgeting. Time becomes a scarce resource, attention becomes a cost, and emotional labour becomes something you spend only when it will be returned. In hybrid work, the shift is easier to miss, because effort has fewer visible signals and withdrawal is quieter than absence.

The pattern usually grows out of mismatch, not mood. [III] Flexibility turns into permanent availability. Praise arrives as slogans, not pay, and “growth” becomes a promise with no date attached. When the rules feel unstable, people protect themselves by shrinking the game to the contract. Only later does the internet hand the pattern a label: quiet quitting. [IV] The phrase is dramatic, but the behaviour is almost boring, a worker still present, still delivering, simply no longer donating free hours and free enthusiasm.

What follows is the part most organisations underestimate. Productivity may not collapse, but the invisible strengths that make teams resilient start to fade: initiative, creativity, trust, and the habit of catching problems early. Work becomes more transactional, less cooperative, and small frictions turn into chronic delays. Leaders often respond by demanding “engagement”, which can deepen the retreat, because it asks for feeling rather than fixing conditions. The real lever is practical: clearer boundaries, fair workloads, credible progression, and a culture where extra effort is chosen, not extracted. Otherwise the workplace keeps running, but it runs on thinner and thinner air.

[Adapted from Oxford Languages]