| Sustainability is now a worldwide issue, and firms increasingly care about the effect of environmental issues on their competitiveness and long-term success (Paille et al. 2014). It has been argued that human resources are central in achieving successful environmental management (e.g. Daily and Huang 2001; Jackson et al. 2011). From the resource-based viewpoint, human resources are important factors in firms’ competitive advantage, due to their rarity, value, non-repeatability, and exclusiveness (Barney 1991; Wright, Dunford and Snell 2001). In the context of environmental protection, human resource management (HRM) can facilitate the successful formulation and implementation of environmental management (Daily and Huang 2001) by aligning practices such as selection, performance evaluation, and training with environmental objectives (Jabbour et al. 2013). Thus, there is an increasing need to integrate green concepts into HRM, referred to as green human resource management (GHRM; Mishra, Sarkar and Kiranmai 2014). GHRM reflects the HRM aspects of environmental management (Renwick, Redman and Maguire 2013), and its focus is on the role of HRM in pollution prevention through the operational processes of firms (Renwick, Redman and Maguire 2013). The concept of GHRM may include other HRM practices, such as practices related to strategic, highperformance, and high-commitment HRM, but GHRM is different from these constructs in the following several ways. First, GHRM reflects a firm’s orientation toward environmental protection and includes a series of specific HRM practices (Mishra, Sarkar and Kiranmai 2014), which focus on the fragility of ecosystems and the ecological effects of companies’ economic activities (Boiral 2002). Other concepts of HRM, such as strategic HRM that relies on organizational strategic goals, have ignored the natural environment, (Delery and Doty 1996). High-performance HRM is a combination of single practices that collectively affect organizational performance, such as the provision of job security and extensive skills training (Sun, Aryee and Law 2007). High-commitment HRM refers to a series of practices that affect performance by creating an organizational commitment environment that stimulates employees’ behavior and capabilities, to increase a firm’s competitive advantage (Collins and Smith 2006). |
