PONE-D-21-34683A capability perspective on sustainable employability: a Dutch focus group study on organizational, work and personal conversion factors.PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Meerman,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

The manuscript has been evaluated by three reviewers, and their comments are available below.

The reviewers have raised a number of overlapping concerns, primarily noting the need for additional clarity to the theoretical motivation for the study, as well as to the methodological details. 

Can you please address these in your revision? 

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 22 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Avanti Dey, PhD

Staff Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at 

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and 

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf

2. We note that you have indicated that data from this study are available upon request. PLOS only allows data to be available upon request if there are legal or ethical restrictions on sharing data publicly. For more information on unacceptable data access restrictions, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions. 

In your revised cover letter, please address the following prompts:

a) If there are ethical or legal restrictions on sharing a de-identified data set, please explain them in detail (e.g., data contain potentially sensitive information, data are owned by a third-party organization, etc.) and who has imposed them (e.g., an ethics committee). Please also provide contact information for a data access committee, ethics committee, or other institutional body to which data requests may be sent.

b) If there are no restrictions, please upload the minimal anonymized data set necessary to replicate your study findings as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and provide us with the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories.

We will update your Data Availability statement on your behalf to reflect the information you provide.

3. Your ethics statement should only appear in the Methods section of your manuscript. If your ethics statement is written in any section besides the Methods, please move it to the Methods section and delete it from any other section. Please ensure that your ethics statement is included in your manuscript, as the ethics statement entered into the online submission form will not be published alongside your manuscript. 

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Partly

**********

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: N/A

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: N/A

**********

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: No

**********

4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: 1. Introduction: it is of interest to note that Jahoda did her seminal studies in the 1950s and 1960s, hence, the statement that nowadays other values are important needs more careful consideration!

2. Introduction: I am not sure that JDR model has shifted from outcomes of interventions...I would argue that the JDR model is used most in observational studies rather than intervention evaluation.

3. Introduction: the central aim is interesting, but comes a bit out of the bleu. What is already known? I would invite the authors to expand a bit on the novelty of the current study.

4. Methods: i feel that the authors use the term outcome very loosely...eg line 173 (see also remark 2)

5. Methods: how many participants were included in total, were focus groups done per company (as some of these choices were done as part of the design of the study, please shortly mention this in the method section)?

6. Results: participants, any idea about the educational background?

7. Results: I suggest to include a summarizing table of the conversion factors at three levels.

8. Results: Sometimes the language is a bit confusing, eg line 327 you start with limitations, and then you continue with a positive remark. Thus, the word limit should really be influenced..eg line 346 you introduce the phrase 'to get the grid around', which is difficult to interpret.

9. Results: the social contacts should be explained more for their target (colleagues, supervisor, clients etc). Contacts with the the latter group can be, according to literature, both be positive and negative.

10. Results: line 396 is strange...you start with defining personal level, and then present between group (which by definition is not about individuals)

11. Results: definition problem: is lack of challenge in the job an individual attribute?

12. Discussion: I think that the discussion should be more balanced with respect to evaluation of the direction of the conversion factors, eg hierarchy is presented as a problem, and this will depend most likely on educational/professional level of the participants, and also on cultural context. Thus, I would suggest to identify factors rather than interpreting their direction.

13. Discussion: the section on agency starts with a theoretical explanation, which should either follow from the results, or be introduced in the methods.

14. The results are about social contacts, in the discussion this seems ot be interprted as social coherence, which is something else.

Reviewer #2: The reviewed paper presents an important and up-to-date issue of a capability perspective on sustainable employability. The discussed topic requires further scientific exploration.

The article brings sufficient contribution to the development of knowledge in the concerned area. The article closely corresponds to the topic specified in the title. In this article all the issues were discussed in an understandable manner.

The literature selection presents current articles, but some of the root articles are also implemented. I suggest supplementing the subject literature based on the latest publications from this area. The purpose of the article should be clearly defined.

The argumentation and contribution of the paper is on a good level. The conclusions reflect the research results and are linked to the rest of the paper.

Reviewer #3: Review for PONE-D-21-34683 A capability perspective on sustainable employability: a Dutch focus group study on organizational, work and personal conversion factors.

Thank you for the opportunity to review this interesting qualitative paper on the capability approach and sustainable employability. The paper deals with a generally important topic and offers some insights into elements that relate to it. In that sense, the paper is an interesting read. However, in my opinion, the current framing of the paper does not do a convincing job at testing a theory or contributing to theory building (even if it does suggest to do so). The evidence presented and the way it is connected to conclusions, existing evidence, and the theory it is supposed to contribute to are insufficiently convincing. I think this could be solved by implementing a better framing and connecting to the existing sustainable employability literature better. However, it is at the same time unclear to me whether the quality of the data is sufficient to make claims to allow for positioning the identified factors as conversion factors. In sum, although the paper is interesting, I do think the authors have work to do regarding its framing and clarity of the methodological approach and connecting finding to results and conclusions that the paper sets out to offer. Below I offer several comments that are intended to aid the authors in doing so. I hope these are helpful.

Introduction / theory

A major issue with the current paper is that it is focused on sustainable employability but only incorporates a very limited account of that literature. There have been marked developments after the emergence of the capability approach (see for an elaborate critical review specifically: https://doi.org/10.3390/su12166366). The capability approach has been heavily criticized in the literature and several other approaches (that are somewhat compatible with the capability approach) have emerged, but the present paper does not relate to that discussion in any way. Certainly there are ways out of that with the capability approach still having relevance in the context of sustainable employability, but to have a convincing paper that deals with the issue of sustainable employability I think the authors need to connect to the state of the art thinking on this concept.

The paper incorporates several theories and concepts from the fields of work and organizational to connect to sustainable employability. However, the paper does not do a thorough job at explaining these concepts and theories and connections are very loosely made (e.g., ‘positive psychology’ which is a somewhat hollow and broad term; ‘self-determination theory’ which is not explained, ‘house of workability’ which offers little structure in terms of modeling relationships and is also not very clearly explained, the ‘job demands resources model’ which is not explained, ‘positive employability outcomes’ is used but then covers things not traditionally associated as such, ‘person-job fit’ is highlighted but not properly explained). Consequently, the point of incorporating these theories / concepts is not clear to me and I am not convinced that readers who are not very familiar with these theories and concepts can easily follow the line of reasoning. Related to the previous point, if a better connection would be made to the sustainable employability literature, this haphazard discussion of several (already debated) concepts would not be necessary and could be dealt with more efficiently. On a somewhat also related note, the introduction paragraph where this takes place is rather lengthy.

The discussion on the capability approach is easy to follow, but seems a bit imprecise and diverging from original formulations in key papers proposing that approach to sustainable employability. I recommend a more precise discussion and handling of key concepts. There is also some arguable discrepancy between how resources are framed within the capability model and how capabilities are actually measured in the original capability set. Statements suggesting that the capability approach does not focus on resources are therefore rather debatable.

It is somewhat strange that the paper has a paragraph on ‘operationalizing the capability set’ because this has been done in a previous paper already that this paper draws on. With this framing of the paragraph, it is not clear to me as reader what I need to do with the ‘operationalizing’ idea in this context. Perhaps a different frame would help.

The paper states ‘Although the capabilities of Dutch employees are established’. I find that a rather bold and highly debatable statement. What does it even mean? How can such a claim be made on the basis of a single reference? In this same paragraph there is marked repetition of previously made points on conversion factors. The ‘therefore’ sentence after this paragraph is also oddly disconnected from the paragraph itself, and arguably its content does not follow from the preceding paragraph at all. This in itself would not be a big issue, but what is currently still missing in the paper is a clear motivation as to why we should care about this topic at all (what is the issue at hand, why is it so relevant to know about capabilities?) and what important research gap is covered (what do we really know about the capabilities, why don’t we know the specific thing this study investigates, and why is that important to know?). Consequently, the contribution of the study also remains rather vague; what do researchers in this area or society in general stand to gain from this paper? I think these elements should be articulated much more explicitly and convincingly than is currently the case.

Several conversion factors are mentioned, but there is no clear argumentation as to why these factors would function as such. An example would be ‘age’, why would that be such an important conversion factor? And how does that work? I think the paper would benefit from an example or a more convincing explanation of this to help the reader understand conversion factors better.

The paper selects people from different sectors, but the logic behind selecting those sectors is never presented. Why these, why not others?

In the methods section, the paper states ‘We chose focus groups as a methodology to identify conversion factors, because it seems reasonable to take a similar strategy in line with methodologies in the capability literature as stated above.’ This is an odd line of argumentation; one should choose the method / design because it is best suited to answer the research question, not because ‘others did this too’.

Is ‘Focus group interviews’ an accurate and commonly used term? I am not sure.

The build up of the sample is completely unclear after reading the methods section. Information on the sample is needed there.

How purposive was the constellation of each focus group? Was there a specific reason for a certain build-up, was this buildup adequate for having the discussion?

Is there a coding tree?

Is there a protocol for the focus groups available to get insight into questions / discussion topics used?

In the Results section, it is odd that the research question is stated again, unnecessary repetition.

The results section connects some interpretations to industries/sectors; how adequate is the sampling approach for doing that? It doesn’t seem to me like the sample is built up in such a way that such conclusions are possible.

How convinced are the researchers that the ‘conversion factors’ listed are really ‘conversion factors’ because to me they are known aspects that make a work situation nice or horrible. What evidence do we have for the framing of conversion factors? The quotes used don’t seem to explicitly go into that direction (i.e., taking the idea that conversion factors represent the situation of a resource being available to an extent and then the things listed as conversion factors determine the extent to which that resource can be used to realize a certain value).

What is the ‘work level’? It seems more like ‘group’ / ‘team’ level factors discussed there .When I think of the work level, I would think of the nature of work and tasks that individuals perform (either alone or in teams).

The discussion section talks about agency, but where in the data do we see evidence of ‘agency’. Current write up is not convincing here because the connection is insufficiently explict. And relatedly, how is this different from the vast knowledge on autonomy?

What is social coherence? It seems like a complex concept but it is not clearly defined where it is discussed. And then, what is the conclusion here based on specifically.

The JDR paragraph is somewhat too limited. It offers an important (and previously formulated) critique to the JDR (i.e., demands and resources are non-concepts, because whether something is a demand / resource depends on how a person sees it). It could make this point more clear and connect to previous literature on this idea.

‘valid predictors of sustainable employability’. Read the suggested literature on sustainable employability to see that such a statement cannot be convincingly made at all, unless there is a profound quantitative study that longitudinally connects aspects to development in sustainable employability indicators over time.

Social desirability, presentation bias, and rationalizations potentially strongly limit the validity of statements made by participants and consequently conclusion drawn from them. More so than aspects mentioned.

It is too me very unclear what this study adds to existing literature. Even after reading the conclusions I have the impression that we learned nothing new. Maybe this is false, but it too a large extent relates to the fact that things are not adequately framed and connected to evidence to allow for specific novel conclusions and insights regarding conversion factors within the capability approach.

Abstract is very clear and well-written, but it would be informative to know a bit more about the data source (e.g., how many people, how long the discussions, which sectors represented).

**********

6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

**********

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

A capability perspective on sustainable employability: a Dutch focus group study on organizational, work and personal conversion factors.

PONE-D-21-34683R1

Dear Dr. Jan Meerman,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Sylwia Wiśniewska

Guest Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments: