For Love and Money: Rethinking Motivations for the “Great Resignation”

The Covid-19 pandemic generated quite a number of phenomena that affected life in organizations. Perhaps the most notable of these came to be called The Great Resignation. At first, an extraordinary number of people were forced to work from home and they became accustomed to the benefits of such work. When it came time to return to their previous workplaces, however, they chose not to do so; instead, they surprised many theorists by resigning en masse. Why? In the past, we academics have been quite quick to offer explanations for such occurrences; yet, on this historically significant occasion, organization theorists have been uncharacteristically silent. Not so Molly Weinstein and Paul Hirsch. In the spirit of thinking differently, they offer a credible explanation of why people might not want to return to a way of life that they previously had taken for granted. Theirs is an explanation that acknowledges that peoples’ motivations and reasons for action are complex. Those reasons might at first seem to involve mutually exclusive criteria, but no, explaining actions in organizations just requires acknowledging that people can hold two apparently competing values in mind at the same time. – Denny Gioia