Green Human Resource Management and Corporate Social Responsibility for a Sustainable Environment: A Bibliometric Review

Abstract

As heavy industrial activities might lead to damages in the natural environment, different walks of life expect businesses to balance business-related activities and environmental sustainability. The increasing pressure has triggered the development of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and green human resource management (GHRM) practices in organizations, as well as the researchers’ involvement. Due to its interdisciplinary nature and reaching a certain maturity, uncovering mainstreams and new trends in the field is important for both researchers and practitioners. In this study, based on the Web of Science database (WOS), reviewing the articles published from 1990 through 2020 on GHRM and CSR within the context of the environment, determining the main themes by making a taxonomy of the field, revealing new trends in the field and finally discussing the consequences of organizations’ environmental strategies and practices in terms of businesses and environmental impacts have all been aimed. A co-word analysis was performed for content analysis with VOSviwer software. As a result of the analysis, six thematic areas related to the area named green HRM for a sustainable environment, individual outcomes of green HRM and CSR practices, green recruitment and environmental sustainability, organizational outcomes of HRM and CSR, CSR and corporate governance, sustainable applications for environmental sustainability were determined. Based on the concepts in the thmematic areas and related literature, a general distal-proximal antecedents and outcomes framework of the green literature variables is provided. In the second stage, emerging concepts and trends in the field were determined by making an overlay analysis of the keywords. In general, green HRM terms are quite new. In the third stage, co-authorship analysis was made for the social network analysis between authors and countries and the intellectual structure of the field was examined and discussed.KeywordsGreen human resource managementCorporate social responsibilityEnvironmental sustainabilityBibliometric methodsPro-environmental behaviorEnvironmental/financial performance