When a person doesn't fit their work

Image created with Gemini (Nano-Banana) — Person x Organization Misfit

This is the first article in a series about a new approach to assessing Person-Organization Fit.

In one of the organizations I worked with as a consultant, a manager told me something that stuck with me: “This person is excellent, but they simply don’t work here.”

He was right about both halves of the sentence. The person was excellent. And they really didn’t work in that environment.

What caught my attention was what happened next. The conversation revolved around feedback, a development plan and behavior adjustments. Nobody asked the most obvious question: why can’t an excellent person work well in that organizational environment? What is it about this relationship between person and organization that makes it so hard to understand and even harder to solve?

That scene repeated itself over years of consulting on management models and organizational design, in companies of different industries and sizes. Always the same pattern: competent people who couldn’t perform well, and organizations that read it as an individual problem.

It was from these observations that I began developing a new approach to assessing Person-Organization Fit.

Person-Organization Fit (P-O Fit)

The concept of P-O Fit (how well a person and an organization match) has existed in the scientific literature for decades. Amy Kristof-Brown and other researchers have shown that the compatibility between a person and the organization they work for is one of the strongest factors in predicting satisfaction, engagement and job tenure.

The traditional focus of this compatibility, however, is on shared values. If the person believes in the same things the organization says it believes in, there is compatibility. If not, there is friction. It is a powerful idea, but with an important limit: values are easy to declare and hard to verify. A person can genuinely agree with the values of autonomy, transparency and collaboration, and still be unable to work well in an environment that demands those values in practice every single day.

What was missing, at least for what I needed in my consulting work, was an instrument that went beyond values congruence and translated compatibility into something measurable and actionable. Especially for organizations moving away from traditional management models toward more distributed and autonomous ones.

According to Gallup’s biennial State of the Global Workplace survey, about 80% of workers worldwide are not engaged at work. These numbers have been repeating for years.

The conventional answer tends to be: lack of motivation, bad leadership, weak organizational culture. All of these explanations have some validity. None of them goes deep into the problem.

What is rarely questioned is whether the problem starts earlier, at the moment the organization decides whom to hire, how to onboard them and in which environment to put that person to work.

Two kinds of misfit at work

Over the course of my consulting work, I realized there is an important difference between two kinds of misfit at work.

The first kind is visible: the person doesn’t have the competencies the role requires. It is easier to identify and, most of the time, relatively simple to fix with training, time and support.

The second kind is invisible: the person has all the competencies, but the way they think, decide and coordinate their own work is not compatible with what the organizational environment demands of them. This is the kind of misalignment that shows up as “lack of engagement”, as “resistance to change”, as “difficulty working in a team”.

It is what happens when a person who needs autonomy to thrive is placed in a command-and-control structure. Or when someone who works best with clear roles and predictability is dropped into a self-management environment without any transition support. In both situations, the problem lies in the misalignment between the person’s way of working and what the environment demands of them.

This misalignment has a cost. For the company: turnover, low performance, a deteriorating organizational climate. For the person: burnout, loss of self-confidence and the persistent feeling that there is something wrong with them.

A new approach to P-O Fit

The approach to P-O Fit I am developing starts from a different question than the one most companies ask. Instead of “does this person share the right values?”, the question becomes “is this environment compatible with the way this person thinks, decides and coordinates their work with others?”

The difference seems subtle, but it changes the perspective of the assessment. Values are easy to declare and hard to verify. The way someone thinks and decides, on the other hand, can be observed in how that person deals with ambiguity, collaborates with other people and sustains their work over time.

This change of question opens room for a different diagnosis. Two people can genuinely believe in the same values and still thrive in completely different environments. One may need radical autonomy to give their best. The other may need clear structure and predictability for the same purpose. Neither profile is superior to the other; they are simply compatible with different organizational models.

In the next articles in this series, I will present the foundations of this new approach. The concepts that support it, the four indices it measures, the positioning matrix and the 16 profiles that emerge from it. The intention is to offer something useful both for organizations that want to build environments where people thrive, and for people who want to understand why some environments energize them while others drain them.

Something to reflect on

Have you ever seen an excellent person unable to work well in an organization? In your view, what was missing in that relationship?

And in your company: when someone isn’t performing well, is the first question usually about the person, or about how compatible they are with the environment they were placed in?