Sustainable HRM Practices in Corporate Reporting

Štěpánka Hronová,Miroslav Špaček

doi:10.3390/economies9020075

Abstract

Shaped by the current turbulent era of macroeconomic forces, inclusive of the technological challenges of Industry 4.0, and ubiquitous uncertainties, the business environment and its stakeholders hold high expectations for sustainable organizational practices, including harmonized and comprehensible sustainability reporting. Increasingly, responsible behavior towards internal stakeholders comes from within organizations, valuing employees as a key asset and introducing sustainable human resource management (S-HRM) practices to motivate their workforce. Reporting on these S-HRM practices and sustainability is in the highest interests of managers and investors alike. Focusing on the involved parties, employees most particularly, the paper contributes to the stakeholder theory. The literature review, previous S-HRM studies’ interpretation and their critical assessment, the GRI standards’ comparative analysis, and Lawshe’s content validity approach have been applied as the methodological framework. With the purpose to extend the scientific literature on S-HRM and its reporting, the authors aim to close the gap between purely theoretical S-HRM treaties and more practically oriented studies on reporting. The findings on the key areas of S-HRM practices give rise to the S-HRM Practices Model, the main goal of this study. This comprehensible model may serve as a harmonized instrument for sustainable HRM reporting analysis and auditing for academia and practitioners alike.

Highlights

For many organizations worldwide, corporate sustainability has become a major focus because of changes in climate, regulatory pressures and overall demands for higher responsibility among companies regarding their impact on society and the environment (Cohen et al 2012)
This paper aims to present the results in the form of an analytical framework and derive a validated tool from it
The review seeks to identify and understand all potentially relevant research traditions that have implications for the studied topic and to synthesize these using meta-narratives instead of by measuring effect size.”. This methodological methodological tool tool fitting fitting the the purpose purpose and and goal goal of of this this study study uses uses scholarly scholarly sources sources on on aa specific specific topic topic and and provides provides state-of-the-art state-of-the-art knowledge knowledge in in the the field field of of social social aspects of sustainability with a focus on sustainable human resource management

Summary

Introduction

Corporate sustainability has become a major focus because of changes in climate, regulatory pressures and overall demands for higher responsibility among companies regarding their impact on society and the environment (Cohen et al 2012). This is not an easy task to achieve in these challenging turbulent times caused by uncertainties, continuous technological advancement, the increasing speed of innovation and the overall socio-economic, legal and political forces (Randev and Jha. 2019). Through the application of sustainability principles at the employee level and their elaborated public disclosure, brands stand out from their competitors as responsible employers in the labor market.

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion