A Systematic Literature Review of GHRM: Organizational Sustainable Performance Reimagined Using a New Holistic Framework

Abstract

Despite the plethora of explications of the direct and indirect impacts of green people management practices on different dimensions of individual and organizational performance and sustainability, a holistic model demonstrating the constituent aspects and impacts of such sustainability on organizational, individual, and team performance is missing. The objective of this study is to address this gap/void through a review of 127 papers on green human resource management (GHRM) following a systematic literature review approach. Based on the systematic review, this study used a thematic analysis, which identified twenty-four disparate people and organizational aspects and grouped the most used ones into five theoretical lenses, including AMO = ability–motivation–opportunity, RBV = resource-based view, SHT = stakeholder theory, SET =social exchange theory, and SIT = social identity theory. These five sets of results were used to develop the first-of-its-kind holistic framework showing how GHRM works in a cyclical process to fill the missing gap in how to sustainably improve individual, group, and organizational performance for multiple organizational stakeholders. Second, this article contributes theoretically to the social engagement and social identity theories, thereby extending Deci and Ryan’s organismic integration and self-determination theories to show how GHRM practices can be implemented for sustainable organizational performance. Third, this study also proposed a new and more sustainable bottom line for business organizations seeking to improve their performance, and this contribution is referred to as sustainable GHRM-organizational performance (SGHRM-OrgP). Finally, this study proposes a research agenda highlighting where more research areas are needed. Despite the potential that such a model offers for organizational sustainability, the authors recognize the next research step of applying its constituent parts in practically optimizing performance.

1. Introduction

Although organizational performance and sustainability have been considered crucial for doing business, multiple endeavors have been made in business and management, particularly in people management (HRM), for examining and reporting how they become more focused. Green human resource management (GHRM) is one such area that integrates HRM and environmental management (EM). Research suggests that environmentally focused HRM has played a critical part in enhancing organizational sustainable outcomes [1,2,3] and gaining green competitive advantages for businesses [4,5,6,7]. GHRM studies have been concerned with several issues ranging from the environment and the impact of firm activities on the climate, to economic and social concerns. For instance, scholars have argued that ecological dilapidation and climate change have caused financial losses, and hurricanes, droughts, heat waves, and wildfires have devasted lives and livelihoods [8,9]. Hence, research streams have suggested sustainability-oriented strategies in organizations, such as GHRM practices [6,10,11]. By the same token, searching for strategies and techniques that would drive a focus on environmental footprints and attain economic wellbeing for stakeholders has been suggested as mandatory for business organizations [12,13,14]. Therefore, the urgency of responding to such a call has echoed further calls for greener practices [15,16,17], corporate governance [18], and participative employment strategies [14,19].

Multiple stakeholders are putting huge demands on organizations to focus on ecologically friendlier initiatives [20,21,22]. These pressurized demands are part of global trends to safeguard the future of forthcoming generations [21,23]. Such urgent calls for organizations to legally and ethically comply with green people management practices to address organizational eco, financial, and social sustainability have intensified [7,21]. Therefore, addressing organizational concerns for balanced development in terms of the triple bottom line (TBL) concept has become an issue (1,2,3,9, and 17). Figure 1 captures the triple-layered sustainability-oriented pressure areas if business organizations are to comply with GHRM.

The combined cluster of organizational sustainability and green HRM orientations [17,21,23] has reintroduced demands for how normative organizations choose to adopt the triple bottom line and the way their societal, ecological, and economic behaviors are impacted [7,23,25,26]. Despite the increasing research on this vital topic, [17,23,27], ensuring reduced employee carbon footprints through the maximization of efficiencies and minimization of costs, research is lagging in the development of a novel holistic model for how it is implemented. Similarly, despite research suggesting that implementing green HRM has organizational benefits, its advantages for employees’ healthier work–life balance and ecological conservation are limited [7,9,28]. Likewise, the reduction of ecological wastage and how green employee behaviors are shown post-efficiency and cost reductions is limited [21,23,27]. This is despite scholarly claims of customer loyalty, expanded markets, organizational green competitiveness enhancements [6,7], green acceleration [5,11,20], and claims about organizational and individual performance [6,9].

Therefore, the need to investigate past studies’ GHRM practice adoption for sustainable organizational performance [17,21] could not be timelier. Aspects such as how RM acquires, develops, and stimulates employee retention for GHRM implementation and impact [6,29] by applying a range of theories and models of how to do so become a crucial research endeavor. In addition, how firms explore, assimilate, and adjust to ecological demands through people management practices is an urgent call to respond to for sustainable organizational performance [6,11,30,31,32,33]. The assimilation of organizational EM into people management practices is what is being considered in this systematic literature review article of GHRM, particularly in relation to its sustainable organizational, people, and ecological performance.

To achieve the article’s aim and principal objective, a systematic review of relevant GHRM literature and research, particularly on how employee and firms’ performance become sustainable through green HR practice implementation, was conducted. Despite Guerci et al. [34] focusing on the instrumentality of SHT and GHRM practices’ role in responding to stakeholders’ ecological demands, Sathasivam et al. [35] applied RBV theory to show staff’s role in environmental as well as environmental sustainability. Hameed et al. [36] applied the AMO framework to report how green HR practices impact employee green behavior. Likewise, Paillé et al. [37] applied social exchange theory to investigate the green satisfaction of employees in GHRM practice implementation, and Shen et al. [38] applied social identity theory to examine perceived GHRM and non-green workplace outcomes. However, reporting such associations and connections is not sufficient to reveal the level to which GHRM practice implementation can influence individual and organizational performance in a sustainable way [6,9,39]. We have attempted to go a step further by conducting a wide-ranging systematic review to identify the organizational and individual level sustainable performance gap amid the apparent useful connections and permutations and develop a holistic model which indicates the key advantages of adopting GHRM practices implementation in contemporary organizations. The results have also shown the way by which our study has enriched the green HR knowledge base by enunciating the ‘what’, ‘how’, and ‘why’ facets of personnel’s and organizations’ pressures to become greenly responsible.

The next section presents the methods and methodology, followed by the systematic review results, the results, contributions, and implications of the study, conclusions and limitations, and, finally, future research considerations for GHRM.

2. Methods and Methodology

To find out which green HRM research and theoretical orientations have been applied to prescribe what categories of GHRM aspects might be useful to organizations and individuals for improving sustainable performance, a review following a systematic approach was initiated in March 2022 and further revised in January 2023, based on additional materials discovered on the topic.

Search and Selection Procedure

First, we identified the keywords, which were transformed into a Boolean query. The keywords that were used include GHRM, green HRM, green human resource management, sustainable performance, green competitive advantage, GHRM drivers, and GHRM challenges. Second, the articles that were matched with the query were extracted from the two databases, Web of Science and Google Scholar. These two databases were used as previous GHRM studies used these most widely, such as Islam et al. [9] and Chowdhury et al. [7]. Third, all the articles were judged against the insertion–elimination standards (see PRISMA flow diagram, Figure 2 and PRISMA 2020 Main Checklist as a Supplementary Materials) to determine the ones required to be included in the current investigation and catalog them. This procedure resulted in the selection of 127 papers, which can be seen in Figure 2.

3. Systematic Literature Review Results

This section presents the outcomes found in our review of the 127 articles. This review resulted in the identification of twenty-four theoretical notions which were used in earlier human resource and green HRM research and literature. These include NRBV = natural resource-based view; SVFT = supplies–value fit theory; PT = process theory; RBV = resource-based view; CET = corporate environmentalism theory; ST = system theory; HPT = happy–productive thesis; AMO = ability–motivation–opportunity; ICV = intellectual capital-based view; SHT = stakeholder theory; JDR= job demands–resources model; IT = institutional theory; SET = social exchange theory; PEFT= person–environment fit theory; SIT = social identity theory; POF = person–organization fit approach; RAT = reformulation of attitude theories; HCT = human capital theory; Sig. T = signaling theory; SOT = spill-over theory; TPB = theory of planned behavior; SIP = social information processing theory; CT = contingency theory; and SLT = social learning theory. Among these theoretical orientations, the AMO framework is the most frequently applied, followed by the resource-based view, social identity theory, social exchange theory, and stakeholder theory (see Figure 3). Hence, the current paper has pooled these three organizational and two people-focused categorizations (SIT, SET) to draw on our study’s contributions, which is a holistic model showing how GHRM aspects and attributes can fill the distinct gap in how organizations can sustainably address employee and organizational performance. Our outcomes are reported and discussed in the next section (see Section 3.1, Section 3.2, Section 3.3, Section 3.4 and Section 3.5).

3.1. Category One: Stakeholder Orientation, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Socio-Economic Debates

Freeman [40] developed SHT for investigating an organization’s different stakeholders and their involvement in managing corporate operations. Freeman indicated how stakeholders’ concerns can be self-driven, which is akin to Deci and Ryan’s [41,42] self-determination and organismic integration theories. Nevertheless, the dearth of employee and group target alliances might lead to debates, thus disrupting green HR aspects adoption. Shen et al. [38] indicated how stakeholders hold control, which might influence an organization’s operational outcomes and its capability of being sustainable when applied inappropriately. Hence, a critical problem for organizations is ensuring a balance among the diverse conflicting goals of numerous stakeholders’ uninterrupted involvement, and HR procedures that meet stakeholders’ expectations [40], intentions, and interests in going green [7,11,38].

Although groups of ancillary stakeholders might be less crucial these days, Shen et al. [38] reported that a firm is supposed to meet the requirements of its internal stakeholders, such as employees, so they can, in exchange, be sympathetic to a firm’s exterior and interior CSR. Hence, SHT indicates how the enduring survival of an organization relies on the degree to which it forms constructive connections with inner and outer stakeholder groups to accelerate environmental practices [43]. However, how to reflect the organization’s concerns to both inner and outer stakeholder clusters—and their potential impact—still demands further endeavor.

3.2. Category Two: Resource-Based View (RBV), Green Competitive Advantage, Empowerment

The RBV was introduced by several novel protagonists, including Barney [44] and Amit and Shoemaker [45], who viewed this as a set of people, physical, and managerial resources. Yusliza et al. [46] considered RBV as a driver of an organization’s competence in being treated as green. Thus, organizations have been advised to integrate their human capital with ecological capital to produce synergistic outcomes [20,47,48]. GHRM practices have been considered beneficial in augmenting employees’ capability, expertise, and enthusiasm to make these tough to emulate by competitors [49]. Nevertheless, the degree to which employees’ internal motivational efforts to realize how sustainable their organizations’ green goals’ implementation may be is not wholly factored in the RBV theory [48]. As such, we are far away from knowing through which framework this missing void can be reported and, where possible, accomplished/implemented.

Additionally, Yusliza et al. [46] applied the resource-based view for indicating how e-HRM, green employee empowerment, and the HR strategic role might affect GHRM aspects in organizations and sustainable existence. Sathasivam et al. [35] applied the lens of RBV to see the experiences of how the staff of relevant firms adopted green HRM to augment eco-efficiency. The categories of green HRM action plans indicate their importance in tackling the multifarious clusters of material and immaterial resource-based challenges encountered by modern organizations if they wish to be sustainable as well as perform well. Nonetheless, such issues lag in being apprehended by and presented in a holistic model to highlight how their collective synergies might assist organizations to remain greenly competitive and perform sustainably.

3.3. Category Three: Ability–Motivation–Opportunity (AMO) Framework, Self-Determination, and Employee and Business Performance

Appelbaum et al. [50] advanced the AMO framework to show how an individual’s intangible assets, including capability, skills, and knowledge, might be pooled with stimulation if they are supposed to be performing well. This was a pioneering initiative to address the preliminary void between business aim accomplishment and employees’ inspirational tendencies. Nevertheless, these proponents accelerated the inclusion of the employer as the provider of the opportunities for this to happen. Yet, these sources did not articulate how this can be attained via GHRM practice implementation. Therefore, they argued through the AMO framework that individuals perform superbly when they have the requisite capabilities and motivation to be engaged [7,51]. Despite recommendations that people management can support the achievement of such GHRM goals by introducing distinctive, but interconnected, HR practices such as ability, motivation, and opportunity [50], existing studies are still lagging in identifying what part of organizational green HRM practice adoption and employee contributions could be combined to achieve that.

From the beginning, the AMO theory has been extensively applied to show the relationship between people management practices and performance [52,53]. Additionally, Kellner et al. [54] stated, based on their review, that a small number of scholars originally made structural developments to the AMO framework. This is specifically due to the incongruent nature of research plans adopting the AMO theory, as they overlook how the most ‘organismic’ array of encouragements among employees, teams, community, and firms could be ‘assimilated’ in Deci and Ryan’s perspective. Whilst Pham et al. [55] investigated how a range of direct, indirect, and interactive parts of green HRM aspects could improve AMO-oriented practices, Hameed et al. [36] revealed the mediating impacts of GHRM aspects on staffs’ voluntary green behavior through green employee empowerment but ignored Rayner and Morgan’s [56] staffs’ ecological knowledge viewpoint. Despite this, Cheema and Javed [57] supported the use of the AMO framework in green HR management and the degree to which personnel, higher management, and the firm could be involved in stimulating such applications to create a sustainable corporate atmosphere.

3.4. Category Four: Social Exchange (SET), Employee Commitment, Turnover Tendency, Leadership

Bishop et al. [58] found in their study that employees responded to organizational assistance with a sense of obligation that activated fostering better organizational citizenship behavior and lesser turnover. Reciprocity has been reported to be core to driving durable connections among an organization’s stakeholders [59]. Jiang et al. [60] reported that staff professed aid from their organization offering support makes them feel obliged to reciprocate, foster commitment [61], and be satisfied with the job [62]. Nevertheless, the feature, degree, and rationalization for employee commitment in performing their responsibilities and their tendency for supporting organizations to convert to sustainably green in the future; fluctuate from staff to staff, manager to manager, and executive to executive.

By investigating an interactive model, Paillé et al. [37] endeavored to report how individual ecological happiness improves when green HRM aspects are adopted in an administratively compassionate atmosphere. Aboramadan [61] applied the same SET theory to offer a model based on the impacts of GHRM on people’s in-role, extra-role, and green innovative work behavior, whereas Moin et al. [63] examined the impact of TL (transformational leadership) on the subordinate’s job satisfaction through PS (psychological safety) and GHRM practices in hospitality firms. These stratagems indicate the multiple uses of SET and its associations within organizations as well as broader society. Nevertheless, they have not explored our assertions regarding what type of holistic process model could assist employees, firms, and communities in the direction specified.

3.5. Fifth Category: Social Identity Theory (SIT), Incentives, Psychosomatic Commitment

Tajfel and Turner [64] developed SIT to show how individuals form an affirmative self-concept through team identification. According to Shen et al. [38], SIT recommends that perceived GHRM might be positively connected to personnel’s identification with the organization, which might enhance employees’ positive outcomes at the workplace. Thus, the implementation of green HRM directed at attaining the sustainability of the environment is expected to enrich a firm’s image outside and individuals’ confidence [7,19]. However, we don’t know how. The rationality/argumentation indicates the better the individuals identify with their peers and the firm, the better their sustenance for the firm, as well as its capability to form a pro-environmental atmosphere, resulting in maximized sustainable performance, minimized staff turnover, as well as maximized commitment and happiness [9,15,65]. Rubel et al. [11] stated that, via SIT, working with individuals who assist the firm in its green ingenuities (green HRM) can support colleagues and minimize societal insecurity in the workplace. Shen et al. [38] applied SIT to investigate an integrative moderated mediation model, which is based on the association of perceived green HRM with non-green workplace results. The suggested strategies have not reported how a holistic framework can be applied in accomplishing SIT and sustainable performance augmentation.

4. Discussions

This section discusses the results drawn from the systematic literature review on GHRM and sustainable organizational and individual performance. The way business firms apply GHRM practices to address employees’ and groups’ performance sustainably has been a critical gap that was previously missing and is the current focus of this article. This has been addressed through the review’s principal target of offering a holistic model to demonstrate how this gap can be contributed to/filled and thereby resolve the void in the literature. This model has been developed by systematically investigating research outcomes from prior studies by consolidating three firm-oriented as well as two individual-oriented theories to highlight stockholder benefits and sustainable performance aspects. The firm-focused results include SHT, RBV, and AMO, whilst the employee-oriented findings are SIT and SET, the combined total of which have been used in proposing the holistic process model. This model develops a cyclical approach to show various aspects of ‘why, how, and what’ phases companies need to address if they are to ‘go green’/sustainably address individual and group performance, given the discrepancy in their inclusion in earlier research. Therefore, this article has gone a step further by addressing the way green HRM implementation can be achieved holistically to enhance sustainable performance (see Figure 4 below).

Prior research suggests there is trepidation around staff’s involvement with corporate values and how to morally cope [7]. Our results and model demonstrate how to critically improve organizations’ pledges and various demands to be ecologically sustainable [38], and also the degree to which organizations initiate pre-emptive management ingenuities and activities in reaction to similar pressures from internal and external stakeholders to repair environmental harm [1,34]. In addition, previous scholars highlight how numerous stakeholders, such as regulatory authorities, buyers, local society, employees, and suppliers, impose additional, pressurizing requirements on firms to ensure ecological, financial, and societal goal balances [7,11]. Our results and model surmise how staff dedication to GHRM concerns such as green training and development could improve citizenship behavior, which leads to the mitigation of staff turnover intent and, consequently, greater ecological positivity. Therefore, this article contributes to advancing knowledge on the outcomes of stakeholder involvement and dedication to pro-environmental benefits from GHRM implementation by diagnosing organizational members’ and management’s propensity to adopt greener behaviors.

Prior research using RBV suggests that the material and intangible resources of firms and employees could be used prudently to tackle damage [7,8] and alleviate pressures on organizations trying to be eco-friendly through GHRM [6,9,35], while this study’s results and model highlight how RBV truly stimulates an organization and its employees’ propensity to adopt greener, ecologically friendlier practices expediting superior performance and creativity via TLP (transformational leadership passion) [8,47]. In addition, the knowledge of how to identify the loss of resources (tangibly and intangibly) when organizations attempt to adopt greener practices has been highlighted in a way that minimizes an individual’s capability for attaining and upholding GHRM implementation and sustainable organizational performance. While prior studies have shown how critical this is in minimizing GHRM adoption costs [7,27], developing the requisite knowledge of how to reduce this resource damage by reimagining employees’ and organizations’ more efficient use of resources is a new addition to GHRM and sustainable organizational, individual, and team performance. Hence, this study advances Barney’s organizational RBV by demonstrating how being more conscious of how the detrimental impacts on individual and collective resources could hamper their propensity to adopt green HRM practices.

Previous research by Kellner et al. [54] indicated an AMO framework contributing to HRM, whereas this study deduces how the framework can be used to drive diverse GHRM needs and boost staff hiring and green training for pro-environmental benefits. Consequently, the authors are adding to Deci and Ryan’s [41,42] concept of self-determination and organismic integration theories by showing the green credentials organizations and employees require when they identify not only what stimulates them to attain GHRM practice adoption, but also why this is critical at the individual, collective, and business performance levels. Our results and model contribute knowledge to the AMO framework by indicating the way in which organizations improve individual and business-level green initiatives from orientation to retirement uninterruptedly. Our advancement of knowledge on this topic is enhanced through assimilating AMO with other sustainability constructs to show their holistic procedural implementation.

Earlier studies on social identity and social exchange models suggest how employees have recompensed practitioners to improve their organization’s enthusiasm for pro-environmental commitment [27,63,66,67,68]. This study’s findings and model progress knowledge on how employees’ work involvement, work satisfaction, and output levels enhance their organizational identity, leading to discovering the way firms could optimize their ecological and societal association outcomes when GHRM practices are adopted.

By showing all the five green HRM aspects from our results, the authors have demonstrated how these can enhance GHRM practice implementation and organizational, individual, and group performance (see the holistic process model in Figure 4). The model identifies six core, interrelated, and holistic steps whose adoption can help firms improve performance sustainably. A failure to consider all these vital aspects could be disastrous to organizations and communities that aspire to use green HRM and optimize their resource utilization and performance in a more sustainable manner, given their paucity in previous scholarship.

Step One: Emergence of Performance Sustainability (Why?): The holistic model begins with the essence that firms must enhance performance if they are to be sustainable. Earlier SHT studies suggest green initiatives could lead to an organization’s balanced orientation to environmental, financial, and societal goal achievement (Guerci et al. [34]) through management practices. This study advances the knowledge of how the role of internal stakeholders such as employees can complement the efforts of external stakeholders such as regulatory authorities, buyers, local society, and suppliers in the adoption and successful implementation of GHRM for sustainability.

Step Two: Sources of Sustainable Performance (From Where?): Prior studies on this aspect suggest how applying RBV demonstrates the greenness of individuals’ creativeness and novelty (Muisyo et al. [69]), and that green HRM aspects and attributes enhance a combination of ecological, financial, and societal sustainability [70]). Step two of the holistic framework adds knowledge on the range of sources that firms could consider when undertaking attempts at greening their people management practices.

Step Three: Framework for Attaining Sustainable Performance (How?): Previous research using the AMO framework suggests a set of green HRM aspects that can, directly and indirectly, augment performance at employee and organizational levels, respectively. In addition, such research also suggests that stimulating, rewarding, and preparing personnel integrates freedom, evocative duty, and unpretentious engagement in greener ways of making decisions and extra-role green behavioral adoption (Rayner and Morgan [56] and Benevene and Buonomo [71]). Our study’s third step adds to the knowledge by showing what the impact of green HRM adoption and implementation could mean for individual performance via the AMO framework.

Step Four: Employee Performance Enhancement (What are the individual-based results?): Previous scholars on the topic suggest that employee outcomes highlight the significance of direct and indirect mediating and moderating variables, including psychosomatic green atmosphere, green organizational identification, pro-environmental knowledge-sharing, as well as ecological beliefs and values in accomplishing green job behavior and job efficiency practices [11]. This fourth step adds knowledge to the field by showing how employees’ identities need to be enhanced through social identity and social exchange networks to advance and add real value to performance.

Step 5: Organizational Performance Enhancement (What are the organization-wide results?): Earlier studies on this topic suggested HR practices sustain organizational outcomes [72] and facilitate their organizational citizenship behavior. This fifth step advances knowledge on how to address the essence of employee performance as part of a critical mediating issue between GHRM implementation and sustainable organizational and individual performance.

Step 6: Reinforcement (Redirecting further sustainable initiatives.): Previous research suggests that GHRM practices create win-win situations for all internal and external stakeholders [1,2,6]. Our final step adds knowledge to the field by highlighting how, and arguing that individual and organizational performance enhancements are intertwined if they are to be sustainable in the more distant strategic future.

5. Key Contributions

Based on the systematic literature approach adopted in this study and the five key results showing the major aspects necessary to address the sustainability gap in the combined individual, group, and organizational performance, this study contributes a holistic process model that was previously missing in research on GHRM.

5.1. Theoretical Contributions

The originality of this paper, therefore, lies in its main contribution of a holistic process model, highlighting a combination of three organizationally focused and two individually focused theories, which have been used widely in previous studies [24,73,74,75,76,77,78,79]. The novelty of the contribution of this study’s model lies in the combined nature of the five aspects in the following way. The previous studies used each of/or a combination of some of the aspects to show their benefits on GHRM. However, the separate way in which they were used in previous GHRM scholarship has led to a gap in how sustainably contemporary organizations can address their human resource constraints and simultaneously fill the individual, group, and organizational performance problem/lag as identified by previous scholars. Therefore, this article has used the results of previous scholarship on GHRM and presented all the combined five key results in a cyclical model/process highlighting how GHRM works in a continuous cyclical manner to create green competitive advantage and, subsequently, improve sustainable performance. Moreover, it is the first study in the field of GHRM of its type that has combined all the mediators and moderators that were previously treated in isolation, to now show the missing aspects of how GHRM can contribute to overall organizational performance both directly and indirectly. Additionally, this paper’s contribution can be found in the way it has highlighted the areas of GHRM based on TBL, where previous research has been limited and limiting in terms of the growing importance and relevance of the field on sustainable organizational performance.

5.2. Practical Contributions

This research may act as valuable input for the decision-making process by manufacturers, buyers, and other stakeholders of export-oriented RMG and associated manufacturing firms in Bangladesh and similar sustainable performance-challenged businesses, which may be attracted to implementing GHRM practices in the industry for mutual benefits. The study’s holistic process model has demonstrated how this can be done, and why it is practically important for companies to consider doing so. Additionally, this research can be considered as a building block in developing a framework for GHRM practices, particularly in addressing resource and sustainability challenges in contexts where both consistently constrain the operational and strategic viability of firms. Moreover, government and other agencies may wish to make use of the results of this study to identify a range of interconnected sets of regulatory frameworks whose implementation could enhance and complement the GHRM aspects identified in the model. Moreover, dealing with and attempting to improve performance at the individual, group, and organizational levels simultaneously requires a concerted and comprehensive set of sustainability measures identified in this paper’s model. The ‘buy-in’ of various stakeholders, be they in the RMG or other related industries with similar resource and sustainable performance challenges, also needs to be considered within the mix of mechanisms and processes.

6. Future Research Considerations for GHRM

First, with respect to stakeholders’ prominent role in capitalizing on GHRM practice implementation, the role of stakeholders in facilitating GHRM practice implementation has been investigated very rarely. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that few scholars have examined the part played by consumers in sustainable organizational performance and GHRM implementation. Investigating the influence of other powerful interest groups including regulatory bodies, suppliers, buyers, and local society has been noticeably missing in GHRM scholarship. Hence, upcoming studies may apply SHT as a pivotal anchor to examine the way that various stakeholders direct organizations to implement GHRM aspects and practices. Second, despite previous studies exploring the role of GHRM in enhancing the environmental, economic, and social dimensions of sustainability, no single study was found to date that addressed the relationship of GHRM with other dimensions of sustainability, such as political, institutional, and legal. Third, though prior GHRM research has addressed the degree to which functional dimensions such as recruitment and selection, training and development, performance management, and compensation and rewards can be applied to drive GHRM practice implementation, the level to which competitive dimensions, including group communication, organizational culture, organizational scholarship, and a broader social and ecological interface might affect the categories of cognition and skill variety, as well as the mindset required to maximize employee, social, and organizational performance, require further investigation. Fourth, the dearth of empirical studies on the societal dimension of performance sustainability, as well as on the assimilation of factors including ecological, financial, and societal, for determining how employees and organizations have been performing in a sustainable manner at the time of a pandemic and ongoing crises call for additional research. In addition, there is still a paucity of studies in this field on the superseding moderators/mediators between GHRM and societal levels of sustainability. Fifth, despite scholars calling for a direct and mediating relationship investigation into GHRM practices and GCA, the capricious shades of ‘staying green’ has been underexplored. Sixth, despite prior studies suggesting that rewards and compensation play a critical part in affecting behavior and stimulating engagement endeavors, there is still a paucity of research looking into the green category ‘how’ and ‘what’ of incentives and compensation could be introduced for optimizing sustainability performance on an international scale. Henceforth, upcoming GHRM research should address this issue by applying organismic integration as well as self-determination theoretical notions since these viewpoints focus on numerous categories of stimulation mechanisms to improve employee motivation. Seventh, the paucity of studies on GHRM adopting a multi-method orientation needs to be addressed for insightful outcomes on employee, social, and group opinions on which of the upcoming wave of GHRM initiatives and aspects are needed for additional creative ways of GHRM implementation and individual, team, and organizational-level performance sustainability. Research into these areas is urgently needed.

7. Conclusions and Limitations

This paper has explored, characterized, and systematically reviewed multiple theories on HRM, specifically those in the fundamental field of GHRM research, by adopting a systematic literature review approach, critiquing the results found from 127 core research papers, and presenting the five key results. The analysis of the results by using thematic analysis has highlighted how organizations have the propensity to use a total of 24 organizational and individual-focused theories in their implementation and execution of GHRM aspects and attributes. The organization-focused theories are AMO, RBV, and SHT. On the other hand, the people-focused theories are SIT, and SET. By proposing a holistic process model based on these five theoretical results, this study highlights the ‘how’, the ‘why’, and the ‘where’ that could assist organizations and employees to initiate and execute GHRM attributes to enhance performance in a sustainable manner, as well as gain GCA, which has been found absent in prior GHRM literature. Hence, we posit that, based on the results of this paper’s systematic literature review approach and its outcomes, the reimagining of GHRM for a firm and employee performance should be anchored on the more comprehensive combination of 24 integrated business- and employee-orientated aspects and the five theoretical lenses to help fill the individual, group, and organizational performance gap and therefore extend GHRM and performance scholarship. Despite these accomplishments and newer forms of understanding on the topic, we also note that addressing the degree to which a model might offer a stimulus to organizations in demonstrating how they could apply GHRM practices to optimize performance sustainably would benefit from future additional investigations and insights. Moreover, this study has proposed a model based on a systematic literature review, which lacks evidence-based primary, empirical data sources. Nevertheless, we have endeavored effectively to streamline an evolving, yet progressively diverse, dimensional knowledge base on human resource management, generally, as well as on green HRM, and provided new vistas and contributions in addressing overall organizational performance sustainably.