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This study aims to systematically review sustainable human resource management (HRM) research with the aim of establishing its research themes, methods and contextual focus to develop a better understanding of the state of the field and the gaps in the research, as well as to propose a future research agenda.

This study uses a systematic literature review method that involves the use of 122 studies from six reputable databases covering January 2003 to March 2020.

There is an over-concentration on the ecological perspective of sustainable HRM and managers dominate the examined population. Moreover, there are geographical imbalances in sustainable HRM research. More so, the idea of bundling sustainable HRM practices together has received scanty research attention relative to the individual sustainable HRM best practices. Consequently, from a strategic HRM perspective, the authors highlight various ways to bundle sustainable HRM practices together. Also, the authors suggest that the ability-motivation-opportunity enhancing (AMO) theory’s perspective provides particularly useful means for this investigation. Furthermore, the findings suggest that sustainable HRM can influence organisations to become more competitive and effective in their quests to ensure economic prosperity, social well-being and ecological outcomes for their stakeholders.

The evidence reveals that there are significant gaps in the literature on the topic and confirms that the field is still at its developmental stage. Hence, there is a need for more rigorous research on the topic to help develop a better understanding of this new field.

This study contributes by providing the first comprehensive review of sustainable HRM themes, methods and contextual focus and by proposing future research agenda. It, therefore, offers a valuable point of departure for those moving into the sustainable HRM domain, as well as valuable insights for those already working in this space.

The purpose of this study is to analyze sustainable human resources management (HRM) in the Brazilian banking industry and to propose an integrative framework of HRM practices toward sustainability, linking stakeholders to HR systems.

Supported by the stakeholder theory, the research design follows a triangulation of multiple data sources, covering 85% of the national banking industry: (1) annual Global Reporting Initiative sustainability reports, (2) employment tribunal decisions and (3) in-depth interviews with top managers of the Banking Trade Union and the Brazilian Federation of Banks, a trade association.

The analysis reveals various engagement levels across the sustainable HRM dimensions: justice and equality, transparent HR practices, profitability and employee well-being. However, current practices in all dimensions fall largely behind sustainable standards. An integrative framework of HRM practices is also proposed.

The study provides the first integrative framework of sustainable HRM practices in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the interactional relationships between sustainable human resource management (HRM) and positive organizational outcomes, in the context of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), focusing on employees’ perception and mediation of the direct relationships drawing on the theoretical background of the social exchange theory.

Data were collected using a web-based survey (293 usable responses). Respondents were full-time employees from the UAE’s oil-and-gas sector. The proposed hypotheses were tested using hierarchical regression for direct and indirect relationships. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to confirm the validity of the proposed framework.

Sustainable HRM has a significant direct effect on sustainable employee performance and perceived sustainable organizational support. The mediating influence of organizational knowledge sharing (OKS) and employee empowerment were significant to varying degrees, proving the different interactions between the study constructs.

The mediating effect found for OKS and employee empowerment suggests that organizations should consider multiple combinations of practices to sustain positive outcomes, especially in dynamic markets. The alignment between different managerial practices can enhance anticipated organizational outcomes. Establishing knowledge-sharing practices will, therefore, help in enhancing employee performance, supporting the role of sustainable HRM. Empowering employees will also help in establishing a sense of perceived support that employees will value, leading to positive reciprocity from employees.

This study extends the literature on sustainable HRM and its links to positive organizational outcomes in the context of the UAE. The study also demonstrates that mediators of the direct relationships can have varying effects and associations with different organizational outcomes.

The interest in sustainable human resource management has grown in the last decades. However, comprehensive, and systematic research concentrating on the evolution of this field, is still needed. The purpose of this study is to provide an overview and synthesis of the existing body of knowledge on human resource management (HRM) related to sustainability through a bibliometric study of articles published until 2022, identifying the most relevant research in this field. In the literature review, special attention is given to articles that link sustainable HRM to employees’ attitudes, identifying gaps and future research opportunities.

A bibliometric analysis and literature review was conducted over 105 documents obtained from the WoS database, using VOSviewer software program, from which 27 were selected for full-text reading. The applied database filters were: document type (article and early access); index (SSCI and SCI-expanded) and year (2019–2022).

The results show that: sustainable HRM literature is growing, especially after 2019; “Sustainability” is the journal with more publications; and England is the leading country. The network of co-occurrence of keywords analysis unveiled that performance, job satisfaction and behaviors are the most frequently studied topics in HRM.

For successful adoption of sustainable HRM practices, organizations should engage all staff comprehensively, focusing not only on consistent implementation but also on fostering a supportive organizational climate. This is vital for establishing a sustainable workplace where employees who strongly identify with the organization are less willing to leave it.

Through the Systematic Literature Review carried out on the articles published from 2019 to 2022, it was possible to identify opportunities for future research. These topics include employees' perceptions of the implementation of sustainable HRM practices in companies, as well as the impact of these practices on their attitudes and behaviors, taking into account the various HRM practices.

Currently, sustainable HRM is largely an employer-driven exercise based on raising employee productivity. The purpose of the article is to expand this position by fully mapping out sustainable HRM and placing employees at the centre of such practices. A further purpose is to provide a research agenda suited to a wider take on sustainable HRM.

The article centres on an analytical review of extant sustainable HRM literature, plus an analytical review of wider literature considering further ways to sustain employment.

Employee-centred sustainable HRM goes far beyond what is accounted for in the extant HRM literature. The new map accounts for wider parties to sustainable HRM, including trade unions and self-organised employees. An extensive research agenda is a further key output from the study.

The article is based on a literature review. Follow-up empirical research is required to test out aspects of the new map, as well as address research gaps identified by the review.

The findings have practical implications for HRM and occupational health practitioners, line managers, built environment and ergonomics specialists, governments, trade unions and workplace activists. A key practical implication is the potential to create micro-forms of corporatism, where wider political structures are absent, to foster employee-centred forms of sustainable HRM.

The article is novel in terms of drawing on a wide range of incongruous literature and synthesising the literature into a new map and an extensive research agenda.

The purpose of this paper is to advance a conceptualization of sustainable HRM that builds on scholarship focusing on the pluralistic nature of human resource management. The paper seeks to advance the promise of sustainable HRM as an alternative to HRM scholarship that adopts a unitarist frame of reference.

The paper draws on a variety of HRM-related literatures to offer new insights about what a pluralist perspective on sustainable HRM from the perspective of employees would look like and what it would accomplish, and in so doing allow sustainable HRM to become socially sustainable.

Taking a pluralistic perspective is essential for making the concept of sustainable HRM more distinct and robust. Sustainable HRM can offer a challenge to the dominant unitarist perspective on the employment relationship, focusing the attention of researchers on the extent to which employment practices benefit both employers and employees while contributing to social sustainability outside of the employment context.

This paper adds analyses of pluralism and unitarism to the current literature on sustainable HRM while also focusing attention on how sustainable HRM might be more robustly conceptualized and also more normative in its orientation.

This chapter is devoted to sustainable human resource management that leads to sustainable competitiveness. It features the ways human resources can be managed to carry out sustainable goals and the impact of sustainability on employees' attitudes and behaviours. The aim of this study is to explore the complex objectives of sustainability and human resource management and empirically investigate the dynamic relationship between human resources in science and technology and sustainable competitiveness in the case of 35 European countries. Our contribution emphasizes this interrelationship and its causality. For this research, we applied a vector auto-regression (VAR) model, and the Granger causality method to examine the relationship between human resources in science and technology and sustainable competitiveness. A panel data included 314 observations between 2012 and 2021. The panel VAR for analysing the impulse response function was enriched with the 5% and 95%, using Monte Carlo simulations. The research results revealed bidirectional causality in the European countries between human resources in science and technology and sustainable competitiveness. Human resources in science and technology trigger sustainable competitiveness and vice versa. As an element of originality, our study demonstrates that human resources in science and technology contribute to sustainable performance, and, on the other hand, a more competitive and sustainable environment contributes to the development of human resources in science and technology. Thus, the chapter outlines the role of human resources in science and technology with regard to sustainable human resource management (HRM), and how to navigate these objectives so that they can positively influence sustainable competitiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an empirical investigation into the mediating effect of high-performance work systems (HPWS) on health harm (HH). The paper also examines the role of perceived organizational support (POS) and its indirect effect on work intensification (WI) and HH through HPWS. Further, the implications of the HH on individuals, organizations, families and societies are also presented. Recognizing the need for sustainable human resource management (HRM) practices that drive employee well-being and reducing HH is also highlighted.

Data for the study were collected using four established scales. The data collected from 345 executives were analyzed using the SPSS 25.0 Version and Amos 21.0.

The study confirmed that work intensification causes HH. The results also indicate the significant mediation of HPWS and the moderation of POS between WI and HH, thus suggesting the inevitability of HR intervention for implementing sustainable HRM practices, which reduce the negative harm of the work.

Data were collected from executives working in IT organizations in India. However, IT work exhibits broadly similar technology/platforms across the world and hence, applicable to the other contexts as well.

The study suggests that organizations should formulate policies and initiate interventions toward the care of employees, motivating toward higher performance and support them to prevent HH of work. It is difficult to categorize what comprises the care of employees in the current context of HPWS and treating employees as an end in itself. Generally, it is seen in terms of health and safety, work–life balance, remuneration, workload, job role and job design. People are core to sustainable development, and the HR must design and develop systems so that the organization can retain a healthy and productive workforce from a sustainability perspective. Moreover, sustainable work performance is a function of high resource levels of employees (energy, time and competences) and the allocation of resources, leading to resource regeneration. Hence, organizations need to source from a variety of sources and balance it for the sustainable performance of employees.

The HRM literature reveals the positive effect of POS on employee health, but studies that investigated the adverse impact of POS are notably absent. The study bridges this gap and is novel, as it explores the moderating role of POS on HPWS and HH and reaffirms the need for building sustainable organizations and sustainable HRM practices. Moreover, the paper provides contextual support to the literature, where studies relating to sustainable HRM practices in developing countries like India are absent.

This paper aims to provide an empirical investigation into the mediating role of high-performance work systems (HPWS) on health harm (HH). The study also examines the negative moderated role of workplace well-being (WW) and its indirect effect on work intensification (WI) and HH. The paper highlights the implications of the HH on individuals, organizations, families and societies and recognizes the need for sustainable human resource management (HRM) practices that drive employee well-being, thereby reducing the HH. More importantly, the study extends the understanding of sustainable goals through sustainable HRM.

Data was collected using four established scales. The data collected from 324 executives were analyzed using the SPSS 25.0 Version and AMOS 21.0.

The study results confirmed that WW practices reduce the adverse effects arising out of HPWS and WI. The results proved that WI is positively related to HH, and that WW moderates the relationship between HPWS and HH such that HPWS is more positively associated with HH when the WW is low compared to when WW is high.

The data were collected from executives working in Information Technology (IT) organizations in India. The findings and the implications may not be generalized to other industries, as the data is collected from IT professionals.

The study highlights the need for organizations to develop sustainable HRM practices to minimize the HH of work. Organizations should implement well-being interventions and develop activities that promote an individual’s mental and physical well-being alongside limiting work intensity.

HRM Literature reveals the positive effect of HPWS that it engages employees to achieve a competitive advantage to the firm. However, this study examines and empirically proves the negative impact of HPWS on employee health and well-being.