The consensus between Italian HR and sustainability managers on HR management for sustainability-driven change – towards a ‘strong' HR management system

Occupational Safety & Health Management and Corporate Sustainability: The Mediating Role of Affective Commitment

Background

Occupational safety & health management (OSH) has garnered greater attention for its significance in promoting corporate sustainability for organizations in recent decades. The construction industry, in particular, is a major contributor to Malaysia's thirst for corporate sustainability in order to provide long-term support for the country. Thus, the main tenet of this study is to examine the mediating effect of employee affective commitment on the relationship between OSH and corporate sustainability.

Methods

A questionnaire was administered to 273 full-time employees of listed construction companies in Malaysia. Smart PLS software version 3 was used to test the proposed model and hypotheses. Both the measurement model and the structural model were evaluated.

Results

According to the findings, OSH and its dimensions are positively related to employee affective commitment. Employee affective commitment, on the other hand, has been found to be significantly related to corporate sustainability and its dimensions: economic, social, and environmental sustainability. Apart from this, the prominent results reveal that employee affective commitment partially mediates the relationship between OSH and corporate sustainability and its dimensions: economic, social, and environmental sustainability.

Conclusion

This empirical finding adds to the existing literature in explaining how OSH and affective commitment led to corporate sustainability. Several implications are offered to various stakeholders, such as construction companies, policymakers, and relevant regulators.

Linking Career Adaptability and Psychological Well-Being: A Test of Moderated Mediation Model Among Indian Employees

The present study attempts to investigate how career adaptability predicts psychological well-being (PWB) among employees based on career construction theory (CCT). Precisely, the study examined the role of career sustainability as a mediator and sustainable career climate (SCC) as a moderator establishing the relationship between career adaptability and psychological well-being. Data collected from 550 Indian employees in the Indian banking and IT organizations indicate that career adaptability has a significant effect on career sustainability that eventually predicts PWB. In addition, the findings on the interaction effect of career adaptability and SCC on PWB via career sustainability highlighted the significance of unison between individual and contextual factors in realizing important employee outcomes. The results revealed that the indirect effect of career adaptability on PWB through career sustainability is stronger among employees who perceived their organizational career climate to be sustainable.

The mediating role of green innovation and green culture in the relationship between green human resource management and environmental performance

There is evidence in the literature that green HRM practices improve environmental profitability. On the other hand, existing research has failed to explain how GHRM can support the development of a green culture and green innovation influence the firm’s environmental performance and long-term growth. This study investigates the relationship between GHRM, green culture, green innovation, and a firm’s environmental performance. In addition, the study examines the mediating role of green culture and green innovation in the relationship between GHRM and environmental performance. This research conducts a large-scale study of 290 employees from Manufacturing firms in Malaysia. The research results provide managers with a better knowledge of how GHRM helps develop sustainable culture and green innovation and how these elements contribute to the improvement of environmental performance inside the organization. This study also makes a significant contribution in terms of novelty and research relevance by demonstrating that green culture and green innovation positively mediate the relationship between GHRM and environmental performance in a sustainable manner. Managers will understand the GHRM required to develop an ecologically conscious culture and promote green innovation among environmentally conscious employees. Finally, we highlighted the importance of this study for top management in the sense of mediating the role of green culture and green innovation and the consequences for future generations of responsible managers who will acquire this knowledge.

Human Resource Practices for Corporate Social Responsibility: Evidence From Korean Firms

Human resource management (HRM) in managing environmental, social, governance (ESG), or corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives has been recently raised. Yet, little attention has been paid to integrating CSR and HRM. Our primary goal was to identify how and whether certain HR practices are critical for developing employee capability to operate in firms with active CSR initiatives. We first examine the impact of external CSR activities on firm-level work outcomes. Moreover, we attempt to identify a choice of particular HR practices that could be aligned with external CSR activities. We then empirically examine how each HR practice interacts with external CSR activities that influence employee retention and labor productivity. Using three longitudinal datasets conducted by the government-sponsored research institution over 154 publicly traded Korean firms for five waves of survey years, the results show that external CSR has a limited impact on employee retention and labor productivity. However, when external CSR activities are combined with a specific set of HR practices, including person-organization fit-based selection, performance-based pay, extensive investment of training and development, and employee suggestion program, the impact of external CSR on employee work outcomes is more substantial. The results indicate that external CSR and a particular set of HR practices as internal CSR can be complementary and generate a positive interaction on creating sustainable human capabilities.

Changes and Challenges in Human Resources Management: An Analysis of Human Resources Roles in a Bank Context (after COVID-19)

Background: In the coming years, HR in the banking industry will need to play a leading role to develop human capital management, based on people care, evaluation, development, and training. To properly face this change in one of the biggest Italian banks we wanted to contribute to understanding the actual HR areas of change and examine how HR roles are dealing with “being on the frontline” of an unparalleled organisational evolution. Methods: Six focus-group sessions with up to 10 participants per session. Results: The crucial issue that emerged is a profound rupture and crisis that showed the (already existing) fragilities of the HR role interpretation: develop a new synergic relationship with the top management; define a stronger and wider organisational mandate; establish structured moments of discussion between professionals. Conclusion: HR roles in the banking context, especially after the pandemic, entail a high emotional burden related to role assumption. Specifically, our research highlighted the need to discuss the evolution of the HR role with top management, the need for synergies and a definition of the organisational mandate that allows wider participation in terms of decision-making and planning, and finally the need for supervision of HR roles.

Sustainable HRM as a Driver for Innovative Work Behaviour: Do Respect, Openness, and Continuity Matter? The Case of Lithuania

There is a widespread consensus in prior literature that innovative work behaviour is a crucial factor in enabling organisations to adapt to rapid changes, to gain a competitive advantage, and create a sustainable organisation. Despite its importance, knowledge about potential drivers of this behaviour is fragmented and inconsistent. As such, organisations may be restricted in their ability to innovate because they do not know how to induce the employees in a way that will encourage them to explore, generate, champion, and finally implement the ideas. Recently, human resource management (HRM) has been explored among potential drivers, considering it as primary means by which organisations can influence and shape the behaviours of employees. Despite the notion that HRM predicts innovative work behaviour, there is a lack in the literature of insights into the ways the organisations can stimulate behaviour by offering sustainability-focused HRM. Sustainable HRM refers to a new approach to people management with the focus on external business environment (openness), respect for the employee (respect), and balanced interests of employer and employee (continuity). Relying on the notion that organisations are gradually introducing sustainable HRM and trying to close the gap in the literature, the paper is designed to link a new approach to people management with innovative work behaviour. The aim of the paper is an initial assessment of whether sustainable HRM is a driver for innovative work behaviour. Disentangling four dimensions of innovative work behaviour makes it possible to determine whether sustainable HRM can stimulate different behaviour types linked to idea exploration, idea generation, idea championing, and idea implementation. The results of a preparatory survey of 306 employees working in Lithuanian companies showed that respect-oriented HRM and continuity-oriented HRM were positively related to innovative work behaviour and the appropriate dimensions (except for idea exploration in case of continuity-oriented HRM); meanwhile, there was no support for the relationship between openness-oriented HRM and innovative work behaviour. Overall, sustainable HRM was found to be a driver for enhancing innovative work behaviour and its dimensions.

Corporate Social Responsibility and Human Resource Management: Towards Sustainable Business Organizations

Today’s organizations are immersed in a global market, where any detail can provide a competitive advantage over rival companies and condition their sustainability. Corporate Social Responsibility and Human Resource Management have become very powerful tools within companies. However, the potential, development, and measurement of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Human Resource Management (HRM) have not been sufficiently explored. The literature has developed multiple case studies on CSR and HRM and has studied the combination of both factors and their link to economic, environmental, and social sustainability, but has not yet found a solid basis from which to address the new functionality of CSR, HRM, and sustainable business management. This work aims to investigate trends in scientific production related to Corporate Social Responsibility and Human Resource Management. Bibliometric techniques and SciMAT software have been used for this purpose. A total of 314 articles from Web of Science (WOS) indexed journals were analyzed. The results obtained confirm that the interest in the study of these concepts has grown exponentially in the last decade. It should be noted that the definitions of CSR and HRM, and even the relationship between the two, continue to be subject to multiple interpretations. The contribution of this work lies in the fact that, through the longitudinal analysis carried out, light is shed on the groups of issues that emerge with special projection, such as green-management, stakeholders, commitment, competitive-advantage, satisfaction, performance, sustainability, or research-methods-analysis, and which must continue to be explored in order to respond to the demands that business organizations have in this respect, and to help the total integration of the different approaches related to CSR and HRM.

How Proactive Environmental Strategy Facilitates Environmental Reputation: Roles of Green Human Resource Management and Discretionary Slack

Based on natural resource-based theory, we examined how firms’ environmental strategies and environmental reputation depended on their green human resource management and discretionary slack. From the perspective of human resource management, we hypothesized that proactive environmental strategy predicted firms’ environmental reputation through the mediation of green human resource management. We further proposed that slack resources, which can be used discretely by managers for environmental management, enhanced the hypothesized relationships. Using data from firms in environmentally sensitive industries in eastern China, we provided empirical support for our hypotheses. The findings highlight the vital roles played by managers and green human resource management in implementing firms’ environmental strategies and promoting firms’ environmental reputation.

Science Mapping the Knowledge Base on Sustainable Human Resource Management, 1982–2019

The increasing interest in sustainability has led to the emergence of a new research focus in the field of human resource management (HRM). HRM scholars have recently begun to explore how HRM might contribute to sustainable outcomes and coined the term ‘sustainable human resource management’(S-HRM). In this bibliometric review, science mapping tools were used to examine 475 Scopus-indexed documents on S-HRM. The objectives of the review were to analyze the size, evolution, and regional distribution of this knowledge base, identify key journals, documents, as well as authors, examine the intellectual structure of this literature, and highlight topical trends. The review revealed a knowledge base that is still in the emergent phase, with a global scope but a concentration in Western developed societies. Four Schools of Thought emerged within this field. This review hopes to guide a new generation of S-HRM scholars by providing an overview of the current status of the knowledge base.

The Evaluation of the Project School Model in Terms of Organizational Sustainability and Its Effect on Teachers’ Organizational Commitment

The Turkish Ministry of National Education has been implementing a new management model in the Turkish educational system. The structural features of state-run project schools are being developed with various innovations in terms of management and education models. Specifically, the new management model in which school principals share the authority to make their own teams is of great importance to researchers, educational policy makers, and executors. This study aims to designate the effects of project schools’ structural and managerial characteristics on teachers’ organizational commitment and the schools’ organizational sustainability. It was designed using a sequential mixed research method including scaling and interviewing techniques. In addition, the teachers’ organizational commitment levels in project schools, which were designated as the experimental group, are compared with the teachers’ organizational commitment levels in non-project schools, which were selected as the control group. The study, conducted in 2018–2019, is comprised of 15 project schools and 9 non-project schools located in Istanbul and involved 603 teachers working in these schools. The results show that the structural and managerial features of project schools have positive effects on teachers’ organizational commitment and that this school model seems sustainable, based on all the positive points gathered.

Bringing Context to Workplace Coaching: A Theoretical Framework Based on Uncertainty Avoidance and Regulatory Focus

Workplace coaching is increasingly popular as a global learning and development tool for enhancing employees’ professional capabilities. However, little is known about the role of cross-cultural factors in coaching and the relationships between cross-cultural factors and both coaching approach and motivation factors. Accordingly, by drawing on and integrating theories from the research areas of cross-cultural psychology, regulatory focus, and training, we propose a theoretical framework that unravels the effectiveness of different coaching approaches in different cultural and coaching contexts. We propose that chronic regulatory focus is an underlying mechanism that predicts the effectiveness of a chosen coaching approach in specific contexts of societal uncertainty avoidance (i.e., low vs. high uncertainty avoidance). Furthermore, we propose that coaching context elicits coachee situational regulatory focus, and that compatibility between coachee chronic and situational regulatory focus has a significant impact on coachee pre-coaching motivation. We conclude by discussing implications for future research and practice.

Designing Sustainable HRM: The Core Characteristics of Emerging Field

The common agreement in human resource management (HRM) literature suggests that organizations willing to attract and retain human resources for running business in the future must change the prevailing situation where human resources are rather consumed than developed. In doing this, sustainable HRM has been introduced recently as a response to changes on societal level, labor market, and employment relations. Sustainable HRM is seen as an extension of strategic HRM and presents a new approach to people management with the focus on long-term human resource development, regeneration, and renewal. However, the attributes of sustainable HRM, as compared to mainstream HRM, are not clear. The paper aims at closing this gap by proposing and revealing the characteristics of sustainable HRM, namely: Long-term orientation, care of employees, care of environment, profitability, employee participation and social dialogue, employee development, external partnership, flexibility, compliance beyond labour regulations, employee cooperation, fairness, and equality. This is a theoretical paper.

Raising the Curtain in People Management by Exploring How Sustainable HRM Translates to Practice: The Case of Lithuanian Organizations

Arguing for the necessity to re-think human resource management (HRM), as human resources are becoming scarce, HRM practices themselves can be even harmful for employees, and the mainstream HRM is more interested not in the employee well-being, but in the search for the link between HRM and performance, the paper introduces sustainable HRM as an alternative approach to people management. Sustainable HRM is seen as a design option, which allows one to maintain, renew and restore human resources. Although previous works have broadened the understanding of the meaning given to sustainable HRM and its core characteristics, research into how sustainable HRM translates into practice is still lacking. Thus, the purpose of the paper is to reveal the practices through which 11 characteristics of sustainable HRM are expressed in real people management in organizations. In doing this, qualitative data were collected from Lithuanian organizations using semi-structured interviews with 19 human resource (HR) managers. The research indicated a variety of applied practices, which differ by maturity. Care of employees, profitability, external partnership, fairness and equality, and employee development were revealed as the characteristics of sustainable HRM most explicitly expressed through HRM practices. Nonetheless, the organizations need more heterogeneous HRM activities, which simultaneously consider the economy, environment, society, and human aspects.

Conceptualizing and Creating Sustainable Careers

The world of work continues to change, with potentially dire predictions for the future as technology, work intensification, and workplace inequities impinge on careers, suggesting a need for increased attention on how to sustain them. This article focuses on the concept of sustainable careers: what they are, why they matter now, and what other disciplines are doing to address this phenomenon. The authors conclude with how human resource development can play a significant role in research and practice to develop both systems that foster career sustainability and individuals who are ready to embrace an evolving career climate.

Green Information Technology Usage

Green information technology is resource efficient and effective consumption through the use of IT infrastructures to address environmental sustainability. This study aims to understand the level of awareness and practices of IT professionals towards GIT in organizations. A survey questionnaire was used, the study found that participants have a high awareness and practices of Green IT covering the efficient use of computing resources, energy conservation in an office environment, responsible disposal of electronic wastes, and demonstrate an individual contribution and commitment to GIT adoption practices in organizations. The study also found that male IT professionals have better awareness of GIT in organizations. The awareness and practices of IT professionals in GIT offers direction for organizations to strategically integrate GIT within their core business objectives and activities to attain environmental sustainability. Practical and theoretical implications are presented.