Publisher
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Place of Publication
Chattanooga (Tenn.)
Abstract
The Great Resignation, a period of elevated voluntary employee turnover in the United States beginning in spring 2021 and easing by mid-2023 (Sull et al., 2022; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2023), highlighted dissatisfaction with organizational culture and leadership. Sull et al. (2022) identified toxic workplace culture, including disrespectful and abusive management, as a strong predictor of employee attrition. To explore management-related concerns during and after this period, we examined discussions on r/antiwork, a Reddit community focused on workplace experiences and frustrations. We conducted an exploratory, longitudinal analysis of public r/antiwork posts from March 2021 through February 2025. Of 577,190 archived submission records, 97,254 unique posts containing management-related terms formed the analytic sample (N = 97,254). Using BERTopic, an embedding-based topic modeling approach (Grootendorst, 2022), we grouped posts according to textual similarity. The model assigned 37,536 posts to 199 clusters, and an exploratory codebook organized 27 reviewed clusters into nine candidate themes covering 18,506 posts (19.0% of the sample). We used a pretrained RoBERTa classifier to assess whole-post sentiment and conducted sensitivity analyses across random seeds, text inputs, and embedding models (Loureiro et al., 2022). The classifier labeled 62.9% of management-related posts as negative. Across the four years, compensation and pay rights comprised the largest mapped theme (n = 3,592; 3.69% of the sample), followed by health, safety, and attendance (n = 3,302; 3.40%), career precarity and exit (n = 2,613; 2.69%), and scheduling, hours, and time off (n = 2,449; 2.52%). From the first annual period (March 2021-February 2022) to the fourth (March 2024-February 2025), health, safety, and attendance declined from 4.97% to 2.50% of management-related posts, while scheduling, hours, and time off increased from 1.71% to 3.20%. Clustering was relatively consistent across random seeds and varied more when text representations or embedding models changed. Overall, the findings highlight several recurring concerns related to management, including scheduling, leave, attendance, pay, and workplace interactions. These analyses provide insight into management-related discontent experienced by employees during the Great Resignation and the years that followed, highlighting key considerations for strengthening employee retention, improving the employee experience, and reducing turnover.
Date
November 2026
Subject
Industrial and organizational psychology
Document Type
posters
Language
English
Rights
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Included in
Themes in discontent with management during and after the Great Resignation
The Great Resignation, a period of elevated voluntary employee turnover in the United States beginning in spring 2021 and easing by mid-2023 (Sull et al., 2022; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2023), highlighted dissatisfaction with organizational culture and leadership. Sull et al. (2022) identified toxic workplace culture, including disrespectful and abusive management, as a strong predictor of employee attrition. To explore management-related concerns during and after this period, we examined discussions on r/antiwork, a Reddit community focused on workplace experiences and frustrations. We conducted an exploratory, longitudinal analysis of public r/antiwork posts from March 2021 through February 2025. Of 577,190 archived submission records, 97,254 unique posts containing management-related terms formed the analytic sample (N = 97,254). Using BERTopic, an embedding-based topic modeling approach (Grootendorst, 2022), we grouped posts according to textual similarity. The model assigned 37,536 posts to 199 clusters, and an exploratory codebook organized 27 reviewed clusters into nine candidate themes covering 18,506 posts (19.0% of the sample). We used a pretrained RoBERTa classifier to assess whole-post sentiment and conducted sensitivity analyses across random seeds, text inputs, and embedding models (Loureiro et al., 2022). The classifier labeled 62.9% of management-related posts as negative. Across the four years, compensation and pay rights comprised the largest mapped theme (n = 3,592; 3.69% of the sample), followed by health, safety, and attendance (n = 3,302; 3.40%), career precarity and exit (n = 2,613; 2.69%), and scheduling, hours, and time off (n = 2,449; 2.52%). From the first annual period (March 2021-February 2022) to the fourth (March 2024-February 2025), health, safety, and attendance declined from 4.97% to 2.50% of management-related posts, while scheduling, hours, and time off increased from 1.71% to 3.20%. Clustering was relatively consistent across random seeds and varied more when text representations or embedding models changed. Overall, the findings highlight several recurring concerns related to management, including scheduling, leave, attendance, pay, and workplace interactions. These analyses provide insight into management-related discontent experienced by employees during the Great Resignation and the years that followed, highlighting key considerations for strengthening employee retention, improving the employee experience, and reducing turnover.
Department
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Dept. of Psychology