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

A Meta-Synthesis of Bibliometric Reviews of Research on Managing for Sustainability, 1982–2019

This review of research used meta-synthesis to integrate findings from seven bibliometric reviews of research on managing for sustainability in different management disciplines: leadership, human resource management, entrepreneurship management, innovation management, supply chain management, knowledge management, and strategic management. The purposes of the review were to document empirically key features of this knowledge base as well as to identify leading journals, and documents. The meta-synthesis analyzed bibliographic data associated with 9927 relevant documents sourced from the Scopus index. The review confirmed the existence of a large body of management research on sustainability. This research, which first emerged during the 1980s, has grown exponentially since 2010. Although authorship of this corpus has been concentrated in Anglo-American-European (AAE) societies (60%), the authors of this corpus represent 140 different societies. Moreover, there is a recent trend of increasing contributions from developing societies such as China, India, Malaysia, Brazil, and South Africa. There are large differences in the “between-discipline” proportion of research produced on sustainability topics, with knowledge management and supply chain management evidencing the largest and human resource management the smallest proportions of this literature. The review also provided insight into the most influential journals (e.g., Journal of Cleaner Production, Sustainability, International Journal of Production Economics, Business Strategy and the Environment) and documents in the literature on managing for sustainability. Document co-citation analysis yielded three key conceptual themes within this literature: Sustainable Supply Chain Management, Strategic Management of Resources for Sustainability, Social Entrepreneurship. This analysis further highlighted the central role that strategic management theories have played in shaping sustainability discourse across the different management disciplines.

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.

Sustainable Human Resource Management: How to Create a Knowledge Sharing Behavior through Organizational Justice, Organizational Support, Satisfaction and Commitment

Knowledge sharing (KS) behavior is one of the main drivers to generate social sustainability. It predicts high organizational performance and innovation capabilities, and creates enjoyment and happiness in helping others. Even if incentives to enhance KS behaviors exist, employees would still be reluctant to share knowledge. For this reason, we test a comprehensive model of sustainable human resource management with the inclusion of KS to explain how to enhance collaborative practices in terms of voluntary knowledge sharing. In a comprehensive model, we incorporate organizational justice, employee perceived organizational support, job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment, and how they relate in order to generate knowledge sharing behavior. Using a sample of 1350 employees working for multinational firms operating in Spain, the present research obtains two main results. First, organizational justice, employee perceived organizational support and affective organizational commitment are positively related with KS. Second, employee perceived organizational support, job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment play a mediating role between organizational justice and KS, which reinforces the positive relationship between both constructs. Consequently, employees would be more willing to cooperate and share in fair organizational contexts, especially when they are satisfied and affectively committed, and when their contributions are valued and recognized. Finally, we discuss human resource management’s (HRM) practical interventions and recommendations for future research on sustainable organizations.