Conceptualizing Strategic Green Human Resources Management to Boost Environmental Performance

The emergence and growth of an environmental protection movement as responses to the perception that our planet is reaching extremely high saturation levels of pollution have led to the emergence of a new philosophy labeled as "green". Consequently, in management field, recently we witness the rapid growing research literature on Green marketing, Green accounting, Green retailing and Green general management. However, Green human resource management (GHRM) research, referring to the HRM aspects of environmental management, is relatively scarce. Ironically the literature on Environmental Management often emphasizes that, because organizations are the main cause of environmental problems, they should therefore play a larger part in addressing EM issues. In calling for this area, we expand the scope of strategic HRM (SHRM) to incorporate sustainability issues and, more specifically, to answer a question if there is a space for human resource management to participate in this recent buzzing world. A wide range of eco-initiatives being launched by organizations and managers to address environmental management concerns indicates that there is an opportunity to develop strategic GHRM model of people-management practice, which is emerging as one organizational response to environmental degradation. Though in HRM there is no agreed or fixed list of HRM practices that are used to define or measure human resource management as debates regarding "best fit" and "best practice" keep on proliferating, recently new trend is established: the AMO. Drawing on AMO framework, which discloses the importance of employees abilities, motivation and opportunity to participate, mixed methods are used to survey and draw together the Human Resources elements of Environmental Management and to map the terrain for further study on Green Human Resources Management as yet there are no reported studies on this area within Malaysian setting. Finally, the model is expected to support the recent National Green Policy.