**1. Introduction**

Working mothers often find themselves in difficult situations when trying to juggle the prevailing cultural ideals of being a "good mother" and a "good worker" simultaneously. Efforts have been made to address this issue by introducing family-friendly policies, such as maternity leave. Some countries around the world, such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, Canada, and Italy, require organizations to provide mandatory paid maternity leave [1]. However, the United States has not followed suit in this regard, and only 14% of civilian workers have access to paid family leave [2]. The research is still unclear as to what benefits and significant effects maternity leave could have on this particularly vulnerable working population.

Recently, a new trend known as "quiet quitting" has gone viral on social media. Quiet quitting does not involve the actual quitting of a job to seek higher wages or better benefits elsewhere but is defined as quitting the idea of going "above and beyond" [3]. Quiet quitting appears to be a way to treat burnout and can take several forms, such as not answering emails or phone calls outside of work hours, saying no to new projects not part of a worker's job description or not considered desirable by the worker, and leaving work on time every day [4]. Those who quiet quit lose the motivation to meet expectations in the workplace or "give it their all" and have a tendency to avoid working on additional projects without the incentive of reward [5]. Quiet quitting is also similar to an older phenomenon known as job neglect, which includes reducing participation in workplace tasks and "withholding effort" [5]. Gallup's article "Is Quiet Quitting Real?"

**Citation:** Zhang, T.; Rodrigue, C. What If Moms Quiet Quit? The Role of Maternity Leave Policy in Working Mothers' Quiet Quitting Behaviors. *Merits* **2023**, *3*, 186–205. https:// doi.org/10.3390/merits3010012

Academic Editors: Randal Joy Thompson, Chrys Egan and Tina Wu

Received: 27 December 2022 Revised: 2 March 2023 Accepted: 2 March 2023 Published: 6 March 2023

**Copyright:** © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

details that many workers who quiet quit meet their definition of employees who are "not engaged" meaning that they are psychologically detached from their job and accomplish the bare minimum of work to get by [6]. A common underlying idea of the quiet quitting trend is that work–life balance is very important and that being overworked is overrated and unhealthy [7]. Many people may view quiet quitting as a way of reclaiming their physical and mental health and as a way of putting themselves, not their work, first. However, quiet quitting can have negative impacts; employees who are disengaged cost the economy 7.8 trillion in lost productivity [8]. Additionally, quit quitting can be hazardous in certain fields of work, one of those being healthcare. Employee engagement in the US dropped two percent from 2021 to 2022 with the largest decline being in healthcare workers [9]. Healthcare workers who are disengaged will directly affect patient care, safety, and quality [10]. Engagement and participation of healthcare workers are crucial to patients well-being especially with the short staffing issues brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many healthcare workers suffering from burnout and psychological distress chose to quit their jobs due to the hazardous working environment and the fear of either becoming infected or infecting their family members [11] while others were lost to suicide [12]. This short staffing issue, combined with lack of engagement and participation from those healthcare workers that choose to stay in the field, can lead to medical errors and a decline in patient quality care.

New mothers who are not offered paid or unpaid leave or who feel as if their career opportunities have been impacted by their decision to take maternity leave may feel underappreciated, which can lead to resentment toward their employers or their companies' policies. This, in turn, may cause them to stop putting effort into their work (i.e., quiet quitting). Perinatal mental illness (PMI) is known to affect up to 20% of new or expecting mothers and can significantly impact both the mother and the child. However, PMI tends to go unrecognized and thus undiagnosed and untreated [13]. Stigma surrounding both pregnancy and mental illness also has a tendency to influence attitudes in the workplace and is viewed as disruptive and unpredictable [13]. If a working mother feels unsupported or as though she cannot perform her job well on top of the stress associated with infant care, she may decide to adopt quiet quitting behaviors or quit the workforce entirely.

Quiet quitting is harmful to workplace climate and organizational sustainability in the long run. Reasons include the following: (a) individual work engagement could be severely reduced, which leads to low productivity and negative impacts on the overall organization operational efficiency; (b) other employees may be negatively impacted by their coworkers' quiet quitting behaviors, which could result in underperforming teamwork and even contagious workplace laziness [14]; (c) at the individual level, quieting quitting might lead to the eventual loss of employment due to unsatisfactory work performance over time, and these workers are unlikely to receive good recommendations for another job [15]; and (d) from a society perspective, the whole social system might suffer from low productivity and unhealthy work climates.

Because this field of research, which aims to connect maternal support for working mothers and their quiet quitting behaviors, is nascent, our study is one of the pioneering projects to analyze the complexity of quiet quitting behaviors of working mothers as a result of various workplace maternal leave policies. Our research objective is to understand the underlying effects of various maternity leave support policies on the quiet quitting behaviors and mental health conditions of working mothers across industries. Furthermore, we examine working mothers' overall career experiences (e.g., peer workers' quiet quitting influence and supervisors' support for childcare) to gain insights into effective resources that can be provided to create positive work experiences for working mothers. To enrich the findings, we also examined the race and age differences affecting working mothers' quiet quitting behaviors.

This research contributes to the under-researched area of the effects of maternity leave on quiet quitting in workplaces. Additionally, the study findings provide valuable suggestions for employers who struggle with labor shortages and prevalent quiet quitting problems in their organizations and sectors. This study also has practical implications for policymakers working to promote the mental health of the working population and create a sustainable and healthy workforce.
