Abstract

Purpose

     The study reviews the recent conceptualizations and theorizing of green human resource management (GHRM) and explores GHRM’s interconnections with the sustainability literature. The research findings have implications affecting GHRM measurement and design of future studies in the sparsely investigated human resource management (HRM)-environment-sustainability-responsibility spectrum.

Design/methodology/approach

The study uses a narrative style based on a review of quantitative field evidence from 38 recent empirical papers to provide an analytical framework on how the GHRM research agenda has broadened to include aspects of corporate sustainability (CS) and corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Findings

The study finds support from the literature on the impact of environment-related HR initiatives on building long-term capabilities and enhancing firm-specific social outcomes. Further, the study finds that different perspectives used in the conceptualization of GHRM reveal GHRM’s differential impact on organization and environmental sustainability underlying GHRM’s growing recognition as an important tool for organizations to demonstrate their commitment to being a responsible stakeholder of the socio-economic system.

Originality/value

GHRM scholars would find the review useful as the review provides a detailed explanation of how GHRM problems are defined and measured. The understanding of the process of conceptualization has been identified as a research gap in previous reviews; thus, one of the aims of this paper is to aid further knowledge development by understanding how research has progressed previously. The other benefit of the review is that management practitioners would find the insights useful to align HRM initiatives with organization CS/CSR objectives.

Introduction

     Environmental responsibility has gained significant attention over the past few decades in response to the increase in incidents of environmental harm caused by adverse organizational actions (Paulet et al., 2021). There is growing pressure on businesses to demonstrate transparency on their impact on the environment prompting many to adopt sophisticated environmental management systems (Jabbour and Santos, 2008) or pursue other green strategies to minimize any environmental risks that may arise from their operations. However, there is still a lack of consensus on environmental performance being considered a legitimate indicator of organizational performance (Jackson et al., 2011). Despite concerns, larger companies around the world feel the need to share strong signals about their commitment to act socially responsible on account of rising regulatory and legal requirements, shareholder and customer pressures, UN initiatives, etc. requiring greater disclosures on their governance and decision making (Paulet et al., 2021, p. 161; Ehnert et al., 2016). Organizations are making gradual progress with the emergence of clean technologies; however, the “soft and human” side of organizations remains the main challenge while implementing environment-sustainability initiatives (Jabbour and Renwick, 2018, p. 623).

Conclusion

     Based on this review, it can be concluded that while the focus so far has been on theory application, theory development will likely occur as more data emerges from the field. Therefore, it can be inferred that conceptualizing different relations would play an important role in generating more insights about the phenomenon unfolding in the field offering researchers an opportunity to discover newer explanations. Thus, this research paper offers scholars not only a comprehensive list of existing theories and variables but also explanations of their applications.

     Additionally, the review provides a categorical basis by identifying different conceptualization perspectives to enable future researchers to develop or adopt more comprehensible measures for GHRM assessment (Pham et al., 2020a; Umrani et al., 2020).

     The necessity to update GHRM conceptualization on an ongoing basis has also been recognized as an academic need (Ren et al., 2018). The evidence shows the broadening of the GHRM school of thought from the function and behavioral perspectives to include perceptions and capabilities (Jackson and Seo, 2010; Kramar, 2014). An advantage of this Green human resource management 875 review is that it describes how in-depth GHRM theorizing has been done in recent research. Previously, this was only briefly covered, and it was acknowledged that more scholarly effort would be required to understand the same (Ren et al., 2018). Previous reviews as listed earlier in the methodology section also identified themes and trends of GHRM research, leaving the process of theorizing an unexplored area. Future studies can explore the different configurations of how GHRM has been implemented to conceptualize multiple pathways for achieving organizations’ environmental and sustainability goals.