Green Roles of Human Resource Professionals

Environment sustainability (ES) has emerged as a key strategic priority in organizations due to the significant attention on environmental concerns. Employees are the main drivers of a sustainable corporate environmental strategy, and as a key function that deals with employees, Human Resource Management (HRM) has a vital role in adding value to an organization in achieving ES goals. Emanating from a broader focus on HRM, Green Human Resource Management (GHRM) specifically aims to transform “normal” employees to “green” employees. GHRM is the intersection of HRM and ES. However, despite the significant attention on how GHRM can support ES, scholarly work on understanding the “green role” of HR professionals is sparse. As per the extant literature, it is evident that research conducted connecting GHRM, employee-green behavior, HR professionals and ES is limited. This lack marks a range of theoretical and empirical gaps in the field. One key gap is the absence of a theoretical framework and typology of green roles for HR professionals. Against this backdrop, this article introduces four green roles that HR professionals can play in facilitating environmental sustainability. By doing so it makes a theoretical contribution to broadening the existing literature on ES.