Associations of job-related emotional exhaustion and career decision regret with quiet quitting among private sports facility employees: a cross-sectional mediation study
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY, cilt.17, 2026 (SSCI, Scopus)
- Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
- Cilt numarası: 17
- Basım Tarihi: 2026
- Doi Numarası: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1968120
- Dergi Adı: FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
- Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Scopus, IBZ Online, Linguistic Bibliography, MLA - Modern Language Association Database, Psycinfo, Directory of Open Access Journals, MLA International Bibliography
- Açık Arşiv Koleksiyonu: AVESİS Açık Erişim Koleksiyonu
- Kocaeli Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
Aim: This study examined the associations of job-related emotional exhaustion and career decision regret with quiet quitting among private sports facility employees and tested whether career decision regret statistically mediates the association between job-related emotional exhaustion and quiet quitting. Method: In this cross-sectional survey, administrative staff, fitness trainers, personal trainers, Pilates instructors, and yoga instructors aged 19 and over working in private sports facilities in four districts of Sakarya and Kocaeli, T & uuml;rkiye, were recruited by convenience sampling. Of 700 questionnaires obtained face-to-face on a voluntary basis, 646 valid questionnaires were analyzed. The data collection instruments were a demographic information form, the Job-Related Emotional Exhaustion Scale, the Quiet Quitting Scale, and the Career Decision Regret Scale. Mann-Whitney U, Kruskal-Wallis, Spearman correlation, and hierarchical regression analyses were applied, and statistical mediation was tested using PROCESS Macro (Model 4) with a 95% bootstrap confidence interval. Results: In secondary comparisons, men reported higher career decision regret than women (p < 0.001), whereas job-related emotional exhaustion and quiet quitting did not differ by gender. Married employees reported higher quiet quitting than single employees. Part-time employees reported higher job-related emotional exhaustion, and full-time employees reported higher career decision regret. All three scores differed across age and duration-of-employment groups in non-linear patterns. Job-related emotional exhaustion was positively correlated with quiet quitting (r = 0.474, p < 0.001) and career decision regret (r = 0.253, p < 0.001), and quiet quitting was positively correlated with career decision regret (r = 0.344, p < 0.001). In the hierarchical regression, age, job-related emotional exhaustion, and career decision regret statistically predicted quiet quitting (R2 = 0.342). In the PROCESS model, the total (B = 0.5096) and direct (B = 0.4275) associations of job-related emotional exhaustion with quiet quitting were significant, and the indirect association through career decision regret was small but significant (B = 0.0821; 95% CI [0.0481, 0.1218]), corresponding to about 16.1% of the total association as a descriptive ratio (0.0821/0.5096). Conclusion: Among private sports facility employees, job-related emotional exhaustion was positively associated with quiet quitting, and career decision regret showed partial and modest statistical mediation of this association. These cross-sectional findings are consistent with, but do not establish, the proposed process; they cannot determine temporal or causal ordering and apply only to the sampled private sports facilities.