Employee Involvement in Sustainability Projects in Emergent Markets: History
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Contributor:
Elif Baykal
,
Bahar Divrik

Without a doubt, encouraging the behavior of employees in relation to sustainability is one of the most effective tactics that organizations can use to attain their sustainability goals. It is critical that employees take part in sustainability projects in order for organizations to be successful.

  • sustainability
  • employees
  • employee participation

1. Green Human Resource Management

HR literature is a burgeoning topic of study that connects academics and professionals [1]. Traditional human resource management (HRM) is the process of managing people in organizations, and it includes all of the techniques used to manage people and keep them up to date, qualified, and aligned with the expectations of stakeholders; there is also a focus on activities related to individuals’ professional qualification, learning, and training [2]. According to [3], HR systems have a positive impact on high performance, employee commitment, and job engagement. Ref. [4] discovered the impact of human resource management on well-being and superior performance in recent studies. On the one hand, Ref. [5] suggest that stakeholder-centered HRM, which is in line with the societal goals as outlined by the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), has a critical role to play towards achieving these SDGs by contributing to organizational inclusiveness, sustainability, and resilience.
At this point, green human resource management (GHRM) has gained special attention over the last decade and has evolved into a conceptually and empirically distinct subject from the core topic of sustainable HRM [6]. Since 2016, researchers’ interest in GHRM has expanded [7][8][9][10]. The GHRM literature plays an important role in developing and implementing corporate strategies that aid in the achievement of sustainable development goals [9]. Actually, the importance of GHRM stems from environment-oriented strategy plans that construct, maintain, and promote sustainable development [11]. The social expectations related to business in global environmentalism have also stimulated this growth of GHRM [12].
According to [13], GHRM can increase the green ability of employees by recruiting individuals with high levels of environmental awareness, providing training activities that boost environmentally friendly skills, and inspiring green performance by rewarding and punishing pro-environmental behavior.
When the term’s roots are researched, it becomes clear that there are various definitions of GHRM. For example, Ref. [14] described it as the implementation of human resource management strategies to promote the sustainable use of resources inside businesses and, more broadly, the causes of environmental sustainability. In other words, it tries to improve a company’s long-term development [15]. Later, Ref. [13] defined GHRM as human resource practices aimed at environmental protection and the ecological influence of businesses, while Ref. [12] defined GHRM as the HRM part of environmental management.
GHRM is directly responsible for creating a green workforce that understands, appreciates, and practices green initiative and maintains its green objectives throughout the HRM process of recruiting, hiring, training, compensating, developing, and advancing the firm’s human capital [16][17]. In other words, it refers to the policies, procedures, and systems that require employees of an organization to work for the benefit of the individual, society, natural environment, and business [18]. Green recruitment in GHRM refers to attracting employees who are environmentally conscious [19]; green training is a mechanism that changes employees’ attitudes and involvement in green organizational goals [20]; and green performance appraisal is about rewarding pro-environmental behavior [21].
Organizations can choose environmentally friendly individuals and make them more environmentally friendly after they join the organization thanks to these unique human resource management processes. According to [22], GHRM can improve employees’ overall environmental performance. Ref. [23], discovered in their empirical research that GHRM improves employees’ perceptions of organizational environmental support and that perceived organizational environmental support increases work engagement and task-related pro-environmental behavior while decreasing quitting intentions. GHRM has the ability to increase green work participation [24]. In accordance with the existing literature [13][25][26][27], researchers assumed that adoption of GHRM literature can result in more inventive and motivated personnel willing to begin sustainability-driven projects.

2. Employee Participation in Sustainability-Driven Projects

Employees are the key to successful environmental education, according to [28]. GHRM adds positively employee participation in environmental [29]. By rewarding green performance and establishing an ecologically friendly environment, GHRM encourages employees to engage in pro-environmental behavior [30]. According to [13], green human resource management (GHRM) should be viewed as an explicit relationship between organizational-level environmental strategy and employee green behavior. Researchers also thought that the connection was one of the most significant instruments for empowering employees to be positive driving forces in the creation of a more sustainable organizational framework. The theory of planned behavior (TPB) is a pervasively used framework for understanding employee intentions and triggering organizational change [31]. It is also based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB) for understanding the effects of employees’ sustainability-driven attitudes that behaviorally support an organizational change on the way to becoming a more sustainable organization. Individual intentions, according to the idea of planned behavior [31], are the most proximal determinants of behavior.
The second factor is subjective norm, which indicates how much social pressure there is to perform or refrain from performing a behavior, and the third is perceived behavioral control, which indicates how much of the action is guided by volitional control. This hypothesis states that when people have positive attitudes about a behavior and believe they can control it, they are more likely to have strong intentions to engage in the behavior [32]. As a result, it is plausible to assume that when employees want to make their organizations more sustainable, they will initially start moving in this direction and persuade their superiors to follow suit. Furthermore, while employees are at the beginning of the organization’s greening, a bottom-up change management process may develop. Contrary to popular belief, upward psychological pressure from superiors in managerial jobs may cause them to be more attentive to sustainability challenges and may assist them in adopting sustainability-driven plans and projects, albeit unintentionally [33].
According to the existing literature, top managers [28][34][35] and HR authorities [35][36] drive most organizational-level sustainability efforts. In other words, organizations’ sustainability strategies are determined from the top down. However, researchers  know from the existing literature that when employees participate in significant decision-making processes, they become more motivated to participate in OCB and are enthusiastic about extra-role performance, including pro-environmental behavior [37]. There is a definite demand in the literature for empirical studies exploring the significance of employees launching sustainability-oriented activities and projects. In this regard, no research has been conducted in the Turkish corporate world.

This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/su151813929

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