1. Introduction
Over the last decade, HRM scholars have increasingly drawn attention to the challenge to develop more Sustainable HRM systems to enhance human sustainability (e.g., Ehnert, 2009; Hartog, Morton, & Muller-Camen, 2008; Pfeffer, 2010) as well as HRM systems that support business organizations in reaching their corporate sustainability (CS) goals (Ehnert, Harry, & Zink, 2014; Taylor, Osland, & Egri, 2012). This call to use sustainability both as a “means” to reach CS objectives and as an “end” to design HRM practices and process (Taylor et al., 2012) comes late, despite evidence that HRM practices impact not only employees but also the human, social, and environmental contexts of organizations (Renwick, Jabbour, Muller-Camen, Redman, & Wilkinson, 2016; Rothenberg, Hull, & Tang, 2017) and despite insights that people in organizations play a vital role in the effectiveness and success of a company’s sustainability strategy (e.g., Cohen, Taylor, & Muller-Camen, 2012; Opoku-Dakwa, Chen, & Rupp, 2018).
6. Conclusions
We have undertaken a review of different approaches to Sustainable HRM. By classifying different types, we have contributed to a better understanding of the emerging concept of Sustainable HRM and highlighted how the purpose of HRM is transformed in the search for sustainability. We further developed Dyllick and Muff’s (2016) suggestion that organizations need to focus more on SDGs instead of narrow CS targets. We have also shown that a new understanding of the purpose of HRM is needed to achieve effective design and implementation of Sustainable HRM systems and contribute to solving today’s grand sustainability challenges. This allows us to identify the purpose to which HRM can effectively contribute. Although Type 1 Socially Responsible HRM contributes to economic and social values (with an emphasis on economic values), Type 2 Green HRM contributes to economic and ecological values (with an emphasis on economic values). In turn, Type 3 Triple Bottom Line HRM contributes to triple bottom line values (with an emphasis on economic values), and Type 4 Common Good HRM to common-good values (with an emphasis on finding solutions for grand sustainability challenges). Overall, we make the following contributions to the Sustainable HRM literature.
