Sustainability & human resource management: Changing contours

Technological, global, competitive and environmental factors etc have led to restrategising of policies and decision making. This has opened new vistas of challenges, issues and opportunities especially on environmental issues. These issues are incorporated in all the long-term strategic plans for survival and growth in the organisations. Sustainability has become a key focus for many organizations as climate change, regulatory pressures and societal demands for greater environmental and social responsibility have increased. Only recently the link between Environmental Sustainability and HR issues seems to have received consideration. The HR function is critical to achieving success in a sustainability driven organization. Sustainability practice pervades every aspect of doing business and needs to be embedded across an organization at all levels, becoming an ongoing change process. The paper explores the environmental challenges that mount sustainable efforts, how organisations can extend HR policies for promoting environment management initiatives and also highlights the impending benefits to an organisation of such efforts which needs transformation of organisation culture through novel leadership competencies, behaviour and mindsets while retaining its competitive advantage. This also introduces the literature regarding this and their different approaches, to identify the benefit of this perspective for traditional HRM research, and to suggest approaches towards an extended theoretical framework for Sustainable Human Resource Management (SHRM). The paper proposes open research questions and outlines of a perhaps emerging field of research.