Adoption of Green HRM Practices for Building Sustainable Models in the Indian Markets

Abstract

To accomplish United Nations’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, adoption of Green HRM (GHRM) is gaining importance. In recent times, sustainability and environment protection has become an inevitable step to be considered while framing future policies and strategies towards GHRM. Almost all sectors and industries are integrating sustainable environmental processes in the day-to-day work process, one of which is adoption of green HRM practices. The present study is a detailed synthesis of recent literature from 2019- 2021 conducted with the purpose of evaluating the recent developments in adoption of GHRM implementation in various processes, related awareness and challenges, limitations and the impact of COVID-19 pandemic, if any, on implementation of Green HRM (GHRM) process in the work process. Further, the primary data was collected using In-Depth Interviews (IDIs) of one senior HR professionals from each of the four service industries namely, healthcare, banking/financial consultancy, HR consultancy and education. The purpose of IDIs was to analyze the adoption, readiness, challenges and the preparedness of GHRM practices to support environment friendly and sustainable utilization of resources in organization. Results of our study showed that Green HRM is in a very nascent stage in India and the awareness is extremely low. Though GHRM has a huge potential of application across the various HR processes, but the promotion and incentives from the government and industry leaders is lagging. These factors lead to a very poor adoption of GHRM in Indian industries. Moreover, studies have reported that individual green goals and personal moral norms of employees are the determinants and predictors of GHRM. Further, a bottom-to-top approach is recommended so that the employees are involved in boosting the adoption of green management practices.