مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد منابع انسانی سبز برای شبیه سازی رفتار کربن کم – الزویر 2024

Abstract

Sustainability issues have long been a critical notion in business, while successful green human resource management (GHRM) has the potential to help organizations perform better in terms of environmental sustainability. The current paper evaluates the mechanism through which green human resource management affects green organizational commitment, green innovation practices and low-carbon behaviour among 610 employees in South Africa. The study further evaluates the mediation connection among the variables and the moderating influence of green transformational leadership through social cognitive theory. The stratified sampling approach was applied in selecting the respondents, and the structural equation model was applied to test the hypotheses. The empirical outcome of this research is as follows: (1) GHRM has a positive and substantial effect on green organizational commitment, green innovation practices and low-carbon behaviour. (2) The findings also revealed that green organizational commitment and green innovation practices affect low-carbon behaviour among staff. (3) The results suggest that green organizational commitment and green innovation practices have a substantial mediation influence on the connection between green human resource management and low-carbon behaviour. (4) Last, green transformational leadership discovered a positive moderating effect on the link between green human resource management and low-carbon behaviour. The paper makes several practical recommendations for strengthening low-carbon behaviour. Therefore, human resource management managers should outline measures that can be used to empower and engage employees in environmental issues and provide them with autonomy to address these challenges.

Introduction

Governments are pressured globally to accelerate carbon cuts and align national climate action plans with the Paris Agreement (Cai et al., 2022a; Sampene et al., 2021; Wiredu et al., 2023). Steg et al. (2017) believe these programs and interventions will achieve their target when focused on people’s behavioural concepts. Similarly, Wang et al. (2021) proposed that addressing environmental challenges requires behavioural and cognitive changes from all societal sectors and levels. Hence, it is prudent to examine employees’ low-carbon behaviour (LCB) and how it contributes to environmental performance (EP) among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Republic of South Africa. South Africa is the world’s 14th largest emitter of greenhouse gases (Adebayo and Odugbesan, 2021; Shikwambana et al., 2021). Therefore, South Africa plans to reduce its unemployment rate through SMEs and the manufacturing sector; however, van Staden (2022) believes this may put pressure on the energy sector, contributing significantly to the country’s higher levels of environmental pollution. This is because the country’s CO2 emissions are principally high due to a heavy dependence on non-renewable energy sources from SMEs.

Hence, it is imperative to advance research on pollution from SMEs in this era, where there is a growing debate for SMEs to go into “green initiatives.” As Meissner (2022) revealed, green innovation practices (GIPs) and green organizational commitment (GOC) have several implications, such as reducing production costs and improving firms’ EP. In addition, GIP helps firms reduce waste generation, reduce harmful emissions, and preserve natural resources. Firms’ involvement in GIP also helps attract customers who support environmental management initiatives (Bass, 2020; Meissner, 2022). Therefore, this study identified various drivers to improve LCB among SMEs in light of this discussion. LCB has been described as human activities geared toward protecting the environment. LCB is also known in some studies as “environmentally friendly behaviour”, “green environmental behaviour”, and “pro-environmental behaviour” (Foster et al., 2022; Yuan and Li, 2023). As a result of the upsurge in climate issues caused by human behaviour, one subject matter that has attracted interest in environmental sustainability research is LCB (Ansari et al., 2021). To understand the concept of employee LCB, the researcher envisioned social cognitive theory (SCT). SCT emphasizes that individual behaviour influences the environment. This relation is reciprocal determinism; thus, people’s behaviour is defined as the interplay of environmental factors, behavioural concepts, and cognitive factors. As a result, this article extends SCT and evaluates the effect of employees’ LCB.

Conclusions and research implications

6.1. Conclusions
International organizations such as the United Nations and the recent Glasgow Agreement are championing the need for carbon emissions and preserving the environment for future generations. This call has necessitated the importance of this study, which focuses on low-carbon behaviour among employees of SMEs from an emerging country (South Africa). The research hypothesis was evaluated through the SEM-PLS methodology and the IPMA (importance-performance map analysis) analysis approach. The analysis from this research revealed that (1) GHRM has a positive and substantial effect on GIP, GOC, and LCB. (2) The findings also revealed that GOC and GIP positively influence LCB among staff. (3) The results suggest that GIP and GOC have a substantial mediation influence on the connection between GHRM and LCB. (3) Last, GTFL revealed a positive iterative effect on the link between GHRM and LCB. The following is an explanation of the theoretical and practical contributions based on the empirical results of the current analysis.

6.2. Theoretical implications
An integral theoretical contribution of this study is that while some evidence has been provided on the influence of GHRM on LCB (Shoaib et al., 2021), little environmental research has examined the intermediary effect of GOC and GIP on these concepts. More specifically, the evidence outlined in this paper demonstrated that GOC and GIP mediate the connection between GHRM and LCB. This research outcome indicates these variables’ significance in developing green innovation actions. In other words, the commitment levels and innovation practices exhibited by staff members can be influenced by GHRM policies, eventually affecting staff LCB. Furthermore, the study provided empirical evidence indicating that SMEs should invest in GIP and improve their staff’s GOC, as it has been established to be an effective tool for improving EP. Thus, GIP and GOC are future initiatives that bring about dynamic changes in institutions, technologies, and commercial strategies and help improve environmental sustainability. In addition, incorporating GTFL as a moderator provides a novel perspective on leadership’s role in promoting GHRM and LCB. Thus, the research proved that GTFL inspires workers to achieve better results. The research has revealed how vital GTFL is in improving the connection between GHRM-LCB. Therefore, managers must practice the GTFL approach to help foster the improvement of both ecological behaviour and firms’ EP.