This article identifies current progressions and research gaps in Green Human Resource Management literature and investigates the future of green practices in meeting the social sustainability requirements of an organisation. Considering the growing awareness on greening and sustainability, a systematic review of the domain specific literature was carried out using the Scopus and Google Scholar databases which resulted in a set of 174 scientific articles between 1995 and 2019. NVivo Plus software version 12 was used for quantitative processing as well as qualitative analysis of data. Content coding and cluster analysis were performed, the results of which exhibited three clusters namely, green human resource management practices, employee green behaviour at workplace and organisational sustainability. Further manual analysis revealed social sustainability to be the least explored area than economic and environmental pillars of sustainability. From this, the authors conceptually explored a theoretical model suggesting the mediational role of ‘employee green behaviour at workplace’ in the relationship between ‘green human resource management practices’ and ‘social sustainability’ of organisations using grounded theory approach. Therefore, prioritising social equity, health, wellness and well-being, this work examines the state-of-the-art in green human resource management research to unravel the enormous potential of core green practices envisioning social sustainability, which has not been established till date. Based on the content coding, clustering, and further analysis, propositions, future paths and implications are also presented.

Introduction

Green human resource management (GHRM) practices contribute to the sustainability requirements of social equity, health, wellness and well-being of organisation and its employees in addition to the achievement of economic stability and environmental balance. Previous studies have explored the effects of GHRM on employee behaviour (Pham et al., 2019), environmental performance (Kim et al., 2019), and financial performance (O’Donohue & Torugsa, 2016) of organisations. However, the state-of-the-art of GHRM shows lack of studies relating to social sustainability dimension of organisations. This study, therefore, tries to explain the conceptual relationship between GHRM practices and social sustainability of organisations. Additionally, the work attempts to bridge GHRM and Sustainability literature by proposing the mediating role of employee green behaviour at work place using Ability, Motivation, Opportunity (AMO) theory and Social Identity theory. Growing awareness of sustainability and corporate social responsibility has led to the mounting importance of human resources in most of the organisations, along with the financial, legal and other aspects of cleaner production in business. While finance is widely accepted as ‘the lifeblood of business’ (Renwick et al., 2008), human resource is gaining position as ‘the soul of business’, especially in the environmental context (Jabbour & Santos, 2008a).