Sustainable human resource management: Conceptual frameworks

Sustainable human resource management (HRM) literature has been emerging over the last decade as an alternative approach to managing people. The literature is diverse, piecemeal and fraught with difficulties. The Sustainable HRM literature can be categoriSed into three groups. These groups have been labelled “Capability Reproduction”, “Promoting Social and Environmental Health” and “Connections”. Although each group has a different emphasis on different internal and external outcomes, there is a common thread which unites the Sustainable HRM approach. Unlike the literature on Strategic HRM (SHRM) which focuses on economic and financial outcomes, Sustainable HRM emphasises social and human outcomes as well as the economic and financial outcomes.

When the Sustainable HRM literature is taken as a whole some of the limitations of SHRM can be overcome. The literature explicitly recognises the different perceptions of HRM by a variety of stakeholders, the inconsistency of HRM practices, the importance of the CEO, line managers and middle managers in implementing HRM policies and the tensions and ambiguities of organisational outcomes. The paper presents three frameworks which describe Sustainable HRM. One framework describes a general Sustainable HRM model. Another framework describes the issue of paradox in Sustainable HRM and a third framework describes the processes of implementation.