Green Human Resource Management in Context: Investigating Practices from a Comparative Perspective

In line with current discussions on greening organizations and corporate environmentalism, green human resource management (Green HRM) aligns HR aspects with environmental management for improving the environmental performance of organizations. With this cumulative dissertation, I address several research gaps and approach Green HRM from various angles underpinned by different research questions. A substantial part of my dissertation seeks to study Green HRM in light of two variations of context. One paper deals with context in relation to publication practices and regional distribution of the research field by comparing different publication outlets and demonstrating how questionable and quality research affect each other. Another two papers consider the national context for exploring similarities and differences of Green HRM practices across countries. However, one paper examines single practices by drawing on the varieties of capitalism typology, and the other one focuses on the ability, motivation, and opportunity framework to examine Green HRM practices in a cross-national setting. For both latter studies, I conducted a qualitative content analysis of sustainability reports of large companies to detect Green HRM in the respective countries and give insights into what and how frequently companies report on Green HRM. The findings reveal that the majority of companies reported on Green HRM practices, although the term Green HRM itself was not mentioned once. The cross-national analyses further uncover differences in the reporting frequency on Green HRM practices, but also in terms of the type of practices, and with regard to the ability, motivation, and opportunity framework. Besides the three papers, enclosed in my dissertation are two book chapters that cover further aspects of Green HRM. All contributions of my dissertation are summarized in the synopsis and embedded in a brief overview of the literature.