Why current results do not always reveal the margin between role demand and sustainable capacity
When strong performance creates false confidence
Consider an employee who consistently delivers. Objectives are met, stakeholders are satisfied, deadlines are protected and difficult problems are resolved. From a conventional performance-management perspective, the evidence appears reassuring. The employee is producing the required outcomes, so it is understandable for leaders to conclude that the person-role arrangement is working well.
That conclusion may be correct, but it is not the only explanation consistent with the result. One employee may be meeting the demands of the role with substantial practical headroom, supported by an appropriate workload, sufficient resources, clear authority and working conditions that allow the performance to continue. Another employee may deliver an equally strong result through repeated overextension, persistent workarounds, unusually high levels of personal intervention or very little remaining capacity to absorb normal variability. Both situations can initially produce a similar performance score. Pasted text
This creates an important distinction for performance management, talent, workforce planning and organisation design. An achieved result tells us that a demand was met. It does not, by itself, tell us how much practical margin remained after meeting it. Job architecture can help establish what a role requires, while performance evidence can tell us what was delivered. Neither, on its own, necessarily establishes how sustainably a particular person is carrying that demand under the conditions surrounding the work. Pasted text
The central proposition of this edition is therefore deliberately narrow. Strong performance is important evidence of achievement, but it is not sufficient evidence, on its own, that the relationship between person, role demand and operating conditions is sustainable.
Research and validation approach
This edition uses a focused narrative-review approach rather than presenting itself as a systematic review. It draws on several related evidence streams because there is no established academic construct called the “Person-Role Capacity Margin” in the form used later in this article. The closest established literature includes person-environment and person-job fit, demands-abilities fit, job demands and resources, work strain and performance, burnout, job crafting, workplace misfit and the emerging literature on employee sustainable performance. These evidence streams illuminate different parts of the organisational problem, but they do not validate one integrated RewardEdge model. Pasted text
A terminology boundary is therefore important. Person-job fit is an established research construct. In this edition, person-role fit is used as a broader RewardEdge practitioner phrase for the practical relationship among the employee, the demands of the role and the operating conditions in which those demands must be carried. The two terms should not be treated as academically equivalent. Pasted text
Kristof-Brown, Zimmerman and Johnson’s 2005 meta-analysis examined person-job, person-organisation, person-group and person-supervisor fit across 172 usable studies and 836 effect sizes, including outcomes such as attitudes, performance, withdrawal behaviours, strain and tenure. Van Vianen’s 2018 review of person-environment fit is also useful because it frames fit as an interaction between attributes of the person and attributes of the environment while recognising that empirical support for some formal fit propositions is mixed rather than uniform. More recent longitudinal evidence from Lerche, Burk and Wiese followed 3,028 young scientists across eight measurement waves and showed that relationships between abilities, demands and outcomes can vary by context and over time. [1][2][3] Pasted text
The RewardEdge Person-Role Capacity Margin Review introduced later is therefore a practitioner-developed decision aid. It is not a validated psychometric instrument, clinical assessment, workload scale, diagnostic test or legal standard.
Person-job fit is broader than current performance
One reason this distinction matters is that person-job fit is not synonymous with performance. The literature commonly distinguishes between demands-abilities fit, which concerns the compatibility between an employee’s knowledge, skills and abilities and the demands of the job, and needs-supplies fit, which concerns the extent to which the work provides what the employee needs or values. Performance is one outcome that may be related to fit. It is not the definition of fit itself. Pasted text
This matters operationally because organisations can easily reverse the logic. They observe strong performance and infer that the person-job or person-role fit must therefore also be strong. The evidence does not justify that shortcut. A person may possess the capability required by the role while working under conditions that make the current pattern difficult to sustain. Another employee may temporarily struggle despite having a reasonable underlying capability-role match because workload, resources, priorities or operating conditions have deteriorated. Pasted text
For RewardEdge, three questions therefore need to remain distinct. Job architecture asks what the role requires. Performance evidence asks what was delivered. Person-role governance asks whether the person, the demands of the role and the current operating conditions are working together in a sufficiently robust and sustainable way. These questions are connected, but they are not interchangeable.
Why performance and strain can exist at the same time
The next evidence stream helps explain why visible performance cannot always reveal the full operating condition underneath it.
Pindek, Meyer, Valvo and Arvan’s 2024 meta-analysis synthesised 78 unique samples from daily diary and experience-sampling research. At the within-person level, challenge stressors had a positive direct relationship with performance but a negative indirect relationship through strain, while hindrance stressors had negative direct and indirect relationships with performance. [4] The finding requires careful interpretation. It does not show that every high performer is strained, nor does it establish a threshold at which challenge becomes unsustainable. It examines short-term, within-person relationships and should not automatically be translated into long-term individual predictions. Pasted text
What it does show is relevant to management judgement. Strong daily performance and increased strain are not necessarily mutually exclusive conditions. Alarcon’s 2011 meta-analysis provides broader supporting evidence, finding associations between burnout and higher job demands, lower job resources and less adaptive organisational attitudes. [5] Swider and Zimmerman’s 2014 meta-analysis of panel studies adds another boundary: after controlling for prior performance, prior burnout retained a small negative relationship with future performance. [6] None of these findings creates a simple burnout-to-performance prediction rule, but together they support looking beyond the current output measure when leaders are trying to understand whether performance is sustainable. Pasted text
Fit is not a permanent label
A further mistake would be to treat fit as a permanent characteristic of the employee. Person-environment fit is relational. If the person changes, the relationship can change. If the role changes, it can change. If resources, workload, autonomy, support or operating conditions change, the practical relationship between the person and the work can also change. Pasted text
Van Vianen’s review emphasises that person and environment should be considered together rather than treating either side as sufficient on its own. Lerche, Burk and Wiese’s longitudinal findings reinforce the temporal point, while Tims, Derks and Bakker’s three-wave study involving 114 employees and 430 observations provides evidence that person-job fit can vary as employees change aspects of their resources and demands. [2][3][7] The latter study is relatively small and does not mean employees should be expected to redesign poorly constructed jobs themselves. Its relevance is narrower: fit can move as the work relationship changes. Pasted text
This makes the phrase “wrong person in the seat” potentially too simplistic. Sometimes an employee genuinely lacks a capability that the role requires. Sometimes the role has accumulated unreasonable demands. Sometimes resources or support are inadequate. Sometimes a temporary operating disruption is creating the difficulty. Several conditions may also be interacting. A credible diagnosis should identify where the mismatch sits rather than convert a difficult period into a permanent judgement about the individual.
The missing question: how much margin remains?
This edition uses capacity margin as a RewardEdge practitioner concept. It describes the practical headroom that appears to remain after an employee meets the normal demands of the role, before continued performance increasingly depends on persistent exceptional effort, repeated workaround, unusually high support or inadequate recovery. Pasted text
The concept is deliberately qualitative. There is no validated universal measure showing that an employee should retain 10%, 20% or any other numerical amount of spare capacity, and the research reviewed here does not support that level of precision. Capacity margin should also not be treated as another name for person-job fit. An employee may have strong demands-abilities fit but limited practical margin because workload or operating conditions have temporarily deteriorated. Conversely, an employee may have apparent spare capacity while still lacking an important capability required by the role.
Capacity margin therefore introduces a different question: after normal role demand has been met, how robust is the current arrangement to reasonable variation, additional demand and recovery needs?
Imagine two employees who both achieve a difficult quarterly objective. The first completes the work within normal operating rhythms, can absorb reasonable variation and still has enough room to coach colleagues, improve processes and respond to exceptions. The second also achieves the target, but only through repeated late work, deferred development, abandoned improvement activity and constant personal intervention when something goes wrong. The performance score may show two successful employees, but the operating evidence describes two materially different arrangements. Pasted text
The RewardEdge Person-Role Capacity Margin Review
The RewardEdge Person-Role Capacity Margin Review is a seven-part practitioner framework for examining whether strong current performance is accompanied by evidence of a sufficiently robust relationship among the employee, role demand and operating conditions. It should not be used as a psychometric score, clinical assessment or automatic employment-decision tool. Its purpose is diagnostic discipline: to improve the questions asked before strong or weak performance is interpreted too broadly. Pasted text
The first dimension is role demand clarity. Leaders need to establish what recurring accountability, complexity, judgement, authority, workload, stakeholder exposure and decision consequence the role requires under reasonably normal operating conditions. CIPD defines job design, or work design, as the process of establishing employees’ roles and responsibilities and connects sound work design both to work-process effectiveness and to the creation of good-quality jobs. [8] The question is therefore not simply whether the employee is coping, but what the role is actually being asked to carry. Pasted text
The second dimension is demonstrated capability. Leaders need evidence that the employee has demonstrated the capabilities genuinely required by the role. The evidence should come from the work rather than rely only on labels such as high performer, experienced leader or high potential. A person may be exceptionally capable at the current level and still require development before carrying materially different work. Conversely, temporary resource or operating constraints may prevent existing capability from appearing consistently in the performance outcome. Capability and capacity therefore need to remain analytically separate. Pasted text
The third dimension is resource dependence. Strong results should be examined for the resources required to produce them. Performance may depend on unusually high levels of manager intervention, specialist support, informal expertise, overtime from colleagues, personal relationships, manual workarounds or systems that are not reliably available. The objective is not to strip collective support out of performance, because organisational performance is almost always enabled by other people, infrastructure and systems. The issue is fragility. If acceptable results depend continuously on exceptional support that compensates for a structural problem, the current output may overstate the resilience of the arrangement. Pasted text
The fourth dimension is operating conditions. Leaders should examine whether workload has materially increased, priorities remain stable, the role has accumulated responsibilities, or vacancies, system failures, organisational changes, conflicting objectives and cross-functional dependencies are altering what the employee is effectively being asked to carry. Not every performance problem should be located inside the individual. A role that was reasonably designed two years ago can become materially more difficult without its title or grade changing. Equally, a short-term disruption should not automatically be treated as evidence that the enduring role design is defective. Pasted text
The fifth dimension is capacity margin itself. The relevant question is how robust the current arrangement appears after normal demand has been met. Can the employee absorb reasonable variability without performance depending on continual exceptional effort? Can an unusual problem be handled without every other responsibility deteriorating? Can the individual take normal leave without creating an unsustainable catch-up cycle? Is there practical room to learn, improve, delegate or develop others rather than merely maintain current delivery? These questions do not produce a scientifically validated capacity score. They expose a common inference error: the absence of visible failure is not the same as evidence of adequate margin. Pasted text
The sixth dimension is recovery and strain signals. Current performance should be considered alongside evidence about how that performance is being produced. Repeated overtime, persistent work spillover, increasing rework, repeated crisis recovery, deferred development, abandoned improvement work or excessive dependence on individual rescue may all be relevant operating signals. No single signal proves weak person-role fit, and these indicators should not be used to diagnose an employee’s health. Their value is diagnostic. Pasted text
The seventh dimension is revalidation under change. A promotion changes role demand. A restructuring may change resources and support. Automation can remove routine tasks while concentrating judgement. Growth may increase volume, coordination and exception handling. A change of manager may alter autonomy or decision access. The employee may also develop new capability. The organisation should therefore avoid turning “good fit” or “poor fit” into permanent labels. The stronger question is whether current evidence still supports the present person-role arrangement under the conditions that now exist. Pasted text
Why this is not simply another burnout discussion
It would be easy to reduce this issue to wellbeing or burnout. That would be too narrow.
Burnout and strain research is relevant because it demonstrates that work demands and resources matter and that performance alone is not a complete description of an employee’s operating condition. The person-role question is broader. An employee may have limited practical margin without meeting any clinical or research definition of burnout. A role can be poorly designed before severe strain appears. A high performer may sustain exceptional output for a considerable period. Equally, a period of fatigue does not prove that someone is fundamentally mismatched to the role. Pasted text
The emerging research on employee sustainable performance illustrates why precision is important. A 2026 review by La, Arokiasamy and Salleh synthesised 21 Scopus-indexed empirical studies published between 2017 and 2025. The authors found that the field remains relatively small, geographically concentrated and strongly reliant on self-reported, cross-sectional survey designs, with inconsistent conceptualisation and measurement. [9] That is not a sufficiently mature evidence base from which to manufacture universal organisational thresholds.
Misfit is not one thing
The language of weak fit also requires care. Sun and Billsberry’s systematic review examined 107 studies reported in 91 papers on workplace misfit and found substantial variation in how employee misfit had been conceptualised, defined and measured. They argue that misfit is better understood as an umbrella concept containing several different perspectives rather than one simple, universally defined state. [10] Pasted text
That finding has a direct practical implication. Organisations should not convert the RewardEdge review into a new label called “poor fit”. Doing so would reproduce the problem the framework is intended to prevent. The useful diagnosis is more specific: is capability insufficient for the demand, is the role overloaded, are critical resources inadequate, is the current operating environment creating temporary pressure, is there strong capability but little remaining margin, has the role changed faster than the job architecture, or is there genuinely strong and sustainable alignment?
These are different organisational conditions and they require different responses.
The performance-management implication
Traditional performance conversations tend to focus on what was delivered and how it was delivered. Both questions matter, but a third question may be useful when the organisation is trying to understand sustainability: under what conditions was the result produced, and what practical margin remained?
This does not mean reducing performance standards for overloaded employees or using workload as an automatic explanation for missed outcomes. It means improving causal diagnosis before consequences are assigned. A performance system can correctly record that an objective was achieved without establishing whether the work system underneath that result is resilient. It can also correctly record that an objective was missed while remaining incomplete about whether capability, workload, authority, resources or changing priorities contributed to that result. Pasted text
Performance evidence should therefore remain evidence about performance. It should not quietly become a complete assessment of job design, capability, capacity, potential, wellbeing and person-role fit. Each question needs evidence appropriate to the decision being made.
The talent and succession implication
The same distinction matters in talent decisions. Strong performance is reasonably relevant to promotion and succession discussions, but the risk appears when repeated success is interpreted as evidence that substantially more demand can simply be added.
An employee can be excellent in the current role while using most of their practical margin to sustain that performance. Another employee may possess broader capability and more available margin while having fewer opportunities to demonstrate it visibly. This does not mean capacity margin should replace readiness assessment. It means strong current output should not be treated as evidence of unlimited scalability. Pasted text
The question for talent governance therefore becomes: what evidence shows that the employee can carry a different or greater demand, rather than simply evidence that the current demand has been met?
The job architecture implication
Job architecture provides an essential reference point because organisations cannot assess person-role alignment without understanding the work. A job level should describe enduring role demand rather than the amount of effort one particular incumbent must expend to perform it. If one employee requires exceptional effort to perform an otherwise appropriately designed role, the organisation may need to examine capability, fit or individual circumstances. If most capable incumbents require persistent exceptional effort, the problem may sit instead in workload, staffing, process, systems, dependencies or the role design itself. Pasted text
That distinction also matters for grading. An overloaded employee does not automatically occupy a higher-value job. Greater effort is not the same as greater accountability, judgement, authority, scope or organisational consequence. The reverse is equally important: a role should not remain structurally unquestioned merely because an exceptionally capable incumbent continues making a fragile design work.
This is closely connected to the principles developed in RewardEdge’s practitioner book Compensation Structure Design, particularly the need to distinguish enduring job value from incumbent circumstances, temporary pressures and unsupported pay consequences.
The same boundary is reinforced across the wider RewardEdge publications library, where compensation structure design, salary grading, job evaluation and payroll governance are treated as connected but distinct organisational disciplines.
The Reward implication
Reward also needs clarity about the problem it is responding to. Pay may legitimately reflect job value, market position, sustained contribution, demonstrated capability, retention exposure or another explicitly defined Reward rationale. It should not automatically become the repair mechanism for a fragile person-role arrangement. Pasted text
A pay increase may improve retention while leaving an underlying workload, dependency, support or job-design problem untouched. That does not make the increase wrong. It means the organisation should know which problem the money is intended to solve.
This becomes particularly important when the strongest performers repeatedly receive additional work because leaders know they can be relied upon to absorb it. If success continually produces more demand without a corresponding review of role scope, resources or practical capacity, success itself can gradually reduce the margin that made strong performance possible.
At that point, Reward and job architecture need to ask separate but connected questions. What is the role worth? What contribution is being recognised? What operating problem, if any, is the employee being expected to absorb? And is the proposed Reward mechanism actually designed to solve that problem?
This discipline is explored more fully in Compensation Structure Design, particularly the principle that permanent base salary should not be expected to solve every attraction, retention, performance, capability or work-design problem.
What the evidence supports, and what it does not
The evidence supports the broad proposition that person-environment and person-job fit relate to multiple work outcomes rather than to performance alone. It supports treating fit as a relationship between person and environment rather than simply as a fixed employee characteristic. It also supports the view that work demands, resources and strain can matter even while current performance remains strong. Pasted text
The evidence also shows that workplace misfit and employee sustainable performance remain conceptually and methodologically complex. Neither literature currently supports one simple universal measure that can be applied mechanically across roles and organisations.
The evidence does not establish that a high performer who works long hours necessarily has weak person-role fit. It does not establish that strong performance signals impending burnout. It does not establish that low practical margin is itself evidence of poor person-job fit. It does not validate a numerical capacity-margin threshold, and it does not prove that employees with lower apparent margin should be denied progression or opportunity.
Nor does the published literature validate the seven dimensions of the RewardEdge Person-Role Capacity Margin Review as a psychometric or predictive scale.
The defensible conclusion is narrower: current performance is important evidence about achievement, but it is not sufficient by itself to establish that the current relationship among person, role demand and operating conditions is sustainable.
Implementing the distinction in the operating model
Applying this distinction requires functions to retain their proper roles rather than allowing one performance measure to become a universal answer. Job Architecture should define enduring role demand and identify when the work has materially changed. Performance Management should provide credible evidence about outcomes and behaviours. Talent and succession processes should assess capability and readiness without assuming that past output proves unlimited future capacity. Workforce planning should examine workload, staffing and capability availability. Managers should surface changes in operating conditions rather than allowing reliable employees to absorb every structural gap invisibly. Pasted text
Reward should test whether financial consequences reflect job value, contribution, market position, retention or another explicit Reward rationale rather than inadvertently paying for unresolved organisational strain. People analytics can support diagnosis through patterns such as overtime, absence, rework, turnover, workload concentration or repeated exceptions. These indicators should trigger questions, not automatic conclusions about individuals.
A practical governance sequence is:
Role demand → demonstrated capability → operating conditions → performance evidence → capacity margin → diagnosis → action → revalidation
The purpose is not to create another HR score. It is to improve the quality of diagnosis before the organisation concludes either that the employee is the problem or that everything is healthy simply because the target was achieved.
Five leadership actions
First, leaders should separate the result from the conditions that produced it. Outcomes still need to be measured rigorously, but recurring success should be examined for dependence on exceptional effort, unusually high support or persistent workarounds.
Second, the role demand should be defined before the fit is judged. If leaders cannot explain the recurring accountability, complexity, workload, authority and judgement expected from the role, conclusions about fit will rest on an unstable reference point.
Third, leaders should look for margin before adding more demand. Before assigning another strategic project, increasing span or expanding accountability, the organisation should ask whether strong current performance is accompanied by enough practical headroom to absorb the change.
Fourth, leaders should diagnose where the problem actually sits. Capability gaps, role-design problems, resource constraints, temporary operating pressure and genuinely weak alignment are different diagnoses and should not produce the same intervention.
Fifth, the assessment should be revalidated when the person, role or conditions change. Promotion, restructuring, automation, growth, leadership change and major workload shifts can all alter the relationship between person and role. Yesterday’s assessment should not become a permanent label. Pasted text
The RewardEdge perspective
Performance systems are generally designed to tell organisations whether expected outcomes were delivered. They are less naturally equipped to show how much organisational or individual margin remained after producing those outcomes.
That distinction matters because highly capable employees can make fragile systems look healthier than they are. They absorb ambiguity, cover vacancies, resolve exceptions, work around weak processes and protect delivery. Their performance is genuine. The risk lies in interpreting the strength of the outcome as proof that the surrounding arrangement is equally strong. Pasted text
The opposite error is also possible. An employee can be judged as weak when the outcome partly reflects an overloaded role, insufficient authority, inadequate resources or an operating environment that would constrain many capable incumbents.
The better question therefore sits between performance management and organisation design: what does the result actually tell us, and what additional evidence do we need before concluding that the person-role arrangement is robust?
The governing principle of this edition is simple:
A strong result tells you that the demand was met. It does not, by itself, tell you how much margin remained after meeting it.
That margin may be one of the most important things an organisation understands before asking its strongest people to carry more.
Inviting perspectives
Junior Schoeman, our recent discussion created the central tension behind this edition: a score can show that a result was achieved without showing how much practical margin remained. Where would you draw the boundary between evidence of capability and evidence that the person-role arrangement is sustainable?
Wojciech Z. Kaleta, 🎓 PhD, much of your contribution to our discussions has focused on testing what evidence actually supports rather than protecting an attractive interpretation. What evidence would you require before concluding that repeated strong performance proves a robust person-role arrangement rather than simply a successful outcome?
Hassan Tirmizi, your distinction between capability, output and job value is highly relevant here. From a job-architecture perspective, what evidence would tell you that repeated strain reflects a person-role issue rather than a role whose design or operating conditions need to change?
Anthony Calleo, you have emphasised the importance of context, evaluator capability and calibration in talent decisions. What should managers be trained to observe so that “strong performer” does not become shorthand for unlimited capacity or readiness?
Alvin Huang, our earlier discussion touched on capable employees absorbing structural gaps until the real organisational cost becomes visible. What signals should leaders watch for before reliable performance turns into hidden dependency or capacity risk? Pasted text
A closing diagnostic question
Consider a high performer who has delivered every major objective for the last eighteen months. The employee is trusted, experienced and repeatedly given difficult work because leaders know it will be completed. The performance rating is strong.
Now imagine that the organisation wants to expand the role. Before concluding that historical performance proves more demand can safely be added, leadership should be able to answer five questions: what does the role normally require; what capability has the employee demonstrably shown; what resources and operating conditions helped produce the current result; how much reasonable variation can the current person-role arrangement absorb; and what evidence suggests that the current pattern can continue without depending on persistent exceptional effort? Pasted text
If those questions cannot be answered, the organisation may know that the employee is performing strongly. It may know considerably less about whether the current arrangement is robust enough to carry more.
Strong performance should earn recognition. It should not prevent the organisation from examining what that performance is requiring from the person, the role and the system around them.
RewardEdge Consulting supports organisations with compensation strategy, job architecture, performance and Reward governance, salary structures and workforce-design questions where the quality of the underlying evidence matters as much as the final decision.
Sources and further reading
[1] Kristof-Brown, A. L., Zimmerman, R. D. & Johnson, E. C. (2005). Consequences of Individuals’ Fit at Work: A Meta-Analysis of Person-Job, Person-Organization, Person-Group, and Person-Supervisor Fit. Personnel Psychology, 58(2), 281–342. DOI: 10.1111/j.1744-6570.2005.00672.x.
[2] Van Vianen, A. E. M. (2018). Person–Environment Fit: A Review of Its Basic Tenets. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 5, 75–101. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-032117-104702.
[3] Lerche, A. D. S., Burk, C. L. & Wiese, B. S. (2025). Demands-Abilities Fit in Longitudinal Designs: An Eight-Wave Study Predicting Job Satisfaction and Turnover in STEM Professionals. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 159, 104112. DOI: 10.1016/j.jvb.2025.104112. The study followed 3,028 young scientists across eight measurement waves.
[4] Pindek, S., Meyer, K., Valvo, A. & Arvan, M. (2024). A Dynamic View of the Challenge-Hindrance Stressor Framework: A Meta-Analysis of Daily Diary Studies. Journal of Business and Psychology, 39, 1107–1125. The analysis included 78 unique samples.
[5] Alarcon, G. M. (2011). A Meta-Analysis of Burnout With Job Demands, Resources, and Attitudes. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 79(2), 549–562. DOI: 10.1016/j.jvb.2011.03.007.
[6] Swider, B. W. & Zimmerman, R. D. (2014). Prior and Future Withdrawal and Performance: A Meta-Analysis of Their Relations in Panel Studies. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 84(3), 225–236. DOI: 10.1016/j.jvb.2014.01.004.
[7] Tims, M., Derks, D. & Bakker, A. B. (2016). Job Crafting and Its Relationships With Person-Job Fit and Meaningfulness: A Three-Wave Study. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 92, 44–53. The study involved 114 employees and 430 measurement occasions.
[8] CIPD. (2025). Job Design. Factsheet, 23 July 2025.
[9] La, T. T-C., Arokiasamy, L. & Salleh, R. (2026). Bibliometric and Systematic Literature Review of Employee Sustainable Performance. Discover Sustainability, 7, Article 640. The review synthesised 21 Scopus-indexed empirical studies published between 2017 and 2025.
[10] Sun, Y. & Billsberry, J. (2025). What Is This Thing Called Misfit? A Systematic Review Into How Employee Misfit Has Been Defined and Researched. Management Review Quarterly, 75, 3263–3326. The review covered 107 studies reported in 91 papers.
