The word professionalism is thrown around often, including by irrational, incompetent business leaders who have nothing truthful or significant to criticize a worker they do not like. When they have no valid complaint about the quality of an employee's work, their moral character, or something similar, yet the person in question makes them upset, the former might just assert that the latter is being "unprofessional". What does this even mean? To be professional is simply to have a compensated role and perform it well, or at least well enough for the fundamental duties for the organization to not grind to an unnecessary halt. The procedures and skills needed for various jobs are not self-evident like logical axioms, and it can partly be the fault of poor training if someone truly is unprofessional in the literal sense of the word.
Of course, none of this precision and limited scope is what the aforementioned kind of employer or manager really is after. They want some alleged basis for opposing a person who has possibly believed or said nothing problematic or neglected no core duty. Yes, even a so-called "quiet quitter" (what a fucking asinine phrase for its concept!) can be absolutely, unflinchingly professional. The same is true of someone who is distinctly negative in their attitude, hates the company or a particular person they work for, or is apathetic towards their professional life, regarding it as what it really is: a means to the end of obtaining resources for survival or comfort by participating in a social construct and nothing more. An employer might not like this, yet nothing about reality beyond their own mental state is dictated by this.
The vast majority of qualities that supposedly make someone unprofessional are ultimately irrelevant or so petty that, even in the context of pragmatically sustaining the social construct called business, they are of incredibly trivial nature even when they do hinder productivity or competence. Professionalism does not whatsoever entail loving one's job, interacting with non-rationalist coworkers cheerfully as if they are equals, wearing clothing of any formality level, having no tattoos, avoiding profanity, and a host of other such things. It does not require a person to avoid conversations about explicitly philosophical matters, of which religious, scientific, and political issues are but subcategories dependent on logical necessities, or to never speak about their "personal" lives, such as things pertaining to their financial situations, romantic relationships, and so on.
To varying extents, different workplaces tend to strongly encourage habits like these if they do not encode some of them into company policy--not that company policy has any philosophical validity where it goes beyond reason and morality [1]. However, since professionalism has only to do with workplace efficiency or talent, someone could be professional while being utterly malicious, egoistic, and wholeheartedly irrational, and someone could be perfectly rational and righteous without being professional or as much as caring about being professional. Being dedicated to professionalism for the sake of professionalism is erroneous, since it is tied to a social construct rather than a necessary truth at the core of reality; as for anything that merely makes an employer/coworker uncomfortable or deviates from tradition, as long as it is not irrational or evil, there cannot be a problem with it and it is never truly unprofessional.
Their unrelated nature (it does not follow from anyone's preferences, emotions, or beliefs that something is true) ensures that it is folly to confuse a great many things for the qualities of a competent or passable worker. Subjective appeal and longstanding cultural traditions nonetheless lead many non-rationalists to selectively and always fallaciously think of a worker as insufficiently professional for the likes of, say, having hair dyed a certain color or for wearing clothing that is not arbitrarily formal enough. For those with corporate hierarchical power, their status might be what makes them emboldened enough to express their stupidity in the form of company policy or red herring scoldings: perhaps they are just exercising their workplace authority because they can and because it makes them feel empowered to pressure others to submit to their whims.
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