Abstract Teacher-researchers in higher education are increasingly expected to teach, publish, support students, perform administrative work, and contribute to institutional development. These responsibilities are often described as mutually reinforcing, but they may become difficult to sustain when time, autonomy, workload allocation, leadership support, and research infrastructure are insufficient. This article presents a qualitative document-based narrative synthesis of how teacher-researcher role conflict is represented in contemporary higher education scholarship. Guided by Role Conflict Theory and supported by the Job Demands-Resources perspective and professional identity negotiation, the study analyzes how published documents narrate competing role expectations, institutional demands, available resources, coping practices, boundary management, and consequences for professional sustainability. The synthesis prioritizes scholarship published from 2020 to 2026 while retaining foundational theoretical and methodological sources. The analysis distinguishes workload intensity from role incompatibility and short-term coping from sustainable role configuration. It proposes six sensitizing configurations: role accommodation, role integration, role displacement, boundary externalization, sacrificial coping, and sustainable role configuration. The article argues that continued performance should not be interpreted automatically as sustainability because productivity may be maintained through recurrent personal sacrifice and boundary erosion. The findings have implications for workload policy, research support, mentoring, protected research time, and institutional recognition of both teaching and research.