Abstract:
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought significant transformations in the working environment. Moreover, this situation has a detrimental effect on the global community. Specifically, this situation damaged the manufacturing sector, leading many personnel to discreetly resign from their positions. Nevertheless, quitting is not wholly novel and is closely linked to human resource management and organizational employee behavior. Consequently, employees remain employed solely to maintain their income and lack complete emotional or intellectual involvement. In the current work environment, young employees frequently choose a strategy known as “quiet quitting.” This grave matter requires comprehension and resolution. After the pandemic, the number of employees who quietly left their jobs increased by 47%, and it has been found in previous research that this situation is common among people who are primarily engaged in temporary jobs and those who studied only for school education (25% and 31.1%31.1.%. Accordingly, it has been found that many young workers are employed in the textile industry, a sub-part of Sri Lanka’s apparel industry, where many of them are school leavers, employed due to financial difficulties. Previous research shows that many employees leave their jobs and stay quiet in the apparel industry in Sri Lanka. Further, work alienation of employees has a trend of increasing “Quiet Quitting,” and the purpose of this study is to determine the impact of work alienation on the Quiet Quitting of front-line workers in the textile industry in Northwestern Province. This study used a cross-sectional design and quantitative approach to test the six hypotheses. This study discusses work alienation in terms
of powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, self-estrangement, and isolation. The
sample size of this study was 162 front-line workers in the textile industry in North Western Province, and data were collected through a structured questionnaire, an interview questionnaire, an interview, and a simple random sampling technique. Data were analyzed using SPSS (version 26) and the results were validated. These findings indicate that work alienation has a significantly positive impact on quitting. The present study has not used the employees working in the textile industry of other provinces of Sri Lanka and those provinces, and this study has been limited to the front-line workers in the textile industry of North Western Province, Sri Lanka. Therefore, this research concludes that the effect of job alienation in the workplace should be investigated not only for frontline workers in the textile industry but also for workers in other fields. Moreover, employees who leave their jobs silently are disadvantageous for organizations, and this situation can be avoided by creating a satisfying working environment within the organization.
