Pathways towards Sustainability in Organizations: Empirical Evidence on the Role of Green Human Resource Management Practices and Green Intellectual Capital

According to the resource-based view (RBV), an organization can be viewed as a collection of human, physical and organizational resources. These resources are valuable and inimitable, and are the main source of sustainable competitive advantage and sustained higher performance. Green human resource management (GHRM) practices help organizations to obtaina competitive advantage and align business strategies with the environment. In the same way, increases in environmental awareness and strict implementation of international environmental regulations havea greater impact on business sustainability. Environmentalism and sustainability are becoming more of a concern for organizations. For this reason, green human resource managementpractices and green intellectual capital are the main elements of business sustainability. Based on the resource-based view and intellectual capital-based view theory, this study investigated the impact of GHRM practices and green intellectual capital on sustainability, using cross-sectional data. The results show that the two dimensions of GHRM practices (green recruitment and selection, and green rewards) and green intellectual capital (green human capital, green structural capital and green relational capital) have a positive effect on a firm’s sustainability. GHRM practices and green intellectual capital have a positive role in this model. Practitioners, scholars and academics all may take benefits from the findings of this study.Limited variables andemerging and developingeconomies were the scope of this study. Future studies could investigate and explore the impact of green HRM practices and the role of management and stakeholder pressureonnew areas of sustainability.