Over the past few years, the need for sustainable environmental management has increased rapidly and green management has emerged as an important tool for the same. The role of Green Human Resource Management (GHRM) practices in environmental management and green management is widely known but still lesser discussed in academic literature. Thus, realizing the importance of GHRM in environmental management by organizations, this study attempts to identify the important practices of GHRM and evaluate the performance of manufacturing organizations using GHRM practices. A three-phase methodology is used for the same. The first phase involves identification of GHRM practices in manufacturing organizations through literature review and expert opinion. The second phase involves ranking of GHRM practices using Best Worst Method (BWM) and third phase methodology involves evaluating manufacturing organizations on the basis of GHRM practices using Fuzzy Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). This research can help managers to identify important practices of GHRM for their organization. This study also provides a framework for managers to evaluate their organization’s performance on the basis of GHRM practices.

Introduction

Increased manufacturing facilities have caused a transformative change in the economic condition of the developing countries, these changes are greatly influenced by resource constraints and environmental challenges (Marquis et al., 2015; Ren et al., 2017). Also, pressure from stakeholders has forced the modern-day organizations to introduce environment-friendly processes and activities (Molina-Azorín et al., 2009). Organizations commitment towards saving the environment is an indicator of its environmental performance, the performance depends on the following criteria: ability of the organization to control the pollution, lesser discharge of waste in the environment, implementation of recycling and reuse practices at the organization and implementation of systems like ISO 14001 at the organization. All these activities and systems require direct involvement of Human Resource Management (HRM) department (Lober, 1996; del Brío et al. 2007). The success of these pro-environmental strategies is ensured only when they are well aligned with organizations HRM practices (Collins and Clark, 2003). For any new strategy to succeed, organizations require competent manpower and resources that are well trained in performing that task (Jiang et al., 2012). Similarly, implementing green practices in the organization for environmental protection is an arduous task which is largely dependent on the availability of right workforce and managers. Thus, organizations need to develop a strong GHRM department that can recruit people with zeal towards environment protection and also train its current workforce to adopt and implement these activities through proper training programs or by luring them through rewards and special benefits (Mishra, 2017). Ren et al. (2017) have given a working definition of GHRM as “phenomena relevant to understanding relationships between organizational activities that impact the natural environment and the design, evolution, implementation, and influence of HRM systems”. GHRM although being a very important area for organizations is still less researched and most of the studies are done in western context (Masri and Jaaron, 2017; Ragas et al., 2017; Tang et al., 2017). Almost all of these studies are based on either literature review or are focusing on investigating the relationship between GHRM and some other constructs like organizational performance. No study has been done to rank the practices of GHRM.