The Impact Of Green Human Resource Management On Environmental Performance:the Hotel Sector In Sri Lanka's Tourism Industry

The effects of environmental disasters and global warming on the quality of life have increased in recent years.One main reason for this detrimental change is the increasing economic activities and consequent environmental degradation.Therefore,environmental pressure on businesses has intensified over the past few years;thus the future of business is being built on green and socially responsible sustainable operations.The literature on environmental management has recognised that in order to achieve environmental sustainability objectives,organisations can use human resource management practices to stimulate their employees,and great efforts have been made to explore what drives employees to engage in pro-environmental behaviours that help their organisation to become environmentally friendly.Indeed,the growing concerns of sustainable business may be partly responsible for the recent greening of human resource management scholarship and practice.Therefore,this resulted in a new strategic manoeuvre called green human resource management(GHRM).GHRM has been identified as one of the new effective management discipline integrating with environmental management theme in strengthening organisation environmental performance(EP),hence the key grounded on the association of HR practices with the organisation's environmental activities.Thus the topic and research area of GHRM is one which has become increasingly important in the past few years hence,investigating GHRM in the environmental management context is paramount.To date,however,there has been little empirical works have explicitly addressed the extent to which human resource management stimulates employees' friendly environmental behaviours,enabling firms to improve their EP.Over the years,scholars have theoretically highlighted the importance of GHRM in the workplace,while empirical works on the extent to which GHRM practices stimulate environmental performance is a deficit.Therefore,there is still much debate and uncertainty about which GHRM practices are needed to improve environmental performance.This study aims to address such gap in the research by providing a reference research model that is in harmony with the theoretical foundation of GHRM practices that support environmental performance in the hotel sector in Sri Lanka's tourism industry and addressing such gaps is paramount.The objectives of this research is two-pronged,hence the roadmap of the research consists of two main investigations,namely model development and model evaluation.Initially,the desk review was conducted in search of the literature on GHRM using the archival method,which to structure the research.The review was conducted to survey human resource management practices in the aspects of environmental management research from 1996 to 2017 on the process format of human resource management from green human resource planning to green grievance handling and exit.The model development study of this research adopted a triangulation mixed approach which combines qualitative data and quantitative data.A total of 106 HRM practices that can be integrated with environmental management were found in the literature survey.The identified practices were evaluated by HR professionals in face-to-face interviews to determine their views on such practices.It is vital to categorise a large number of related practices into meaningful and understandable practices to enhance their applicability,especially when an organisation is adopting them for the first time.For this purpose,the reduction of data for all variables produced the GHRM constructs using principal component analysis(PCA)through Varimax rotation.The most commonly used decision rules were applied to identify the number of factors underlying the GHRM construct,and the practices were named and defined.A finding of 22 practices under specific GHRM functions was possible.Subsequently,the measures of organisations' environmental performance were examined.A model was also proposed for the analysis of the relationship between GHRM functions and environmental management dimensions that support the improvement of environmental performance,which is one of this study's contributions to the literature.GHRM practices and the EP dimensions,obtained from the results of the baseline survey is adopted and inputted to the next level of the research.Therefore,formative evaluation interviews conducted with 10 HR experts for the identified GHRM practices along with the environmental performance dimensions.Subsequently,the model evaluation study postulated the relations between the observed measures and the underlying factors a priori and then statistically tests the hypothesised structure.The data for analytical purposes were collected from the operational managerial positions through a large-scale survey in Sri Lanka tourism hotel organisations,as researchers deemed that operational managers are better equipped with relevant information to manage their employees in routine activities to improve the environmental activities of the organisation.Based on the identified GHRM practices that related to EP,study postulated the relations between the observed measures and the underlying factors a priori and then tests the hypothesised structure statistically.Applying structural equation modeling to a sample of 218,results demonstrate that,GHRM practices are predicted by green staffing and recruitment function,green skill finding and development function,green welfare and appraisals function and green employee relations and compliance function and have a positive and significant relationship with the dimensions of EP,confirmed that the proposed model is valid.Although,a human response scale used to measure EP and tested for reliability and validity measures.Second order GHRM measurement model also tested to identify a general construct underlying the first order factors,which green human resource management functions and its derivatives,is a single second-order factor of GHRM.Goodness-of-fit statistics related to the second order measurement model is desirable and acceptable,indicate that the second-order model fits the data well and the higher level constructs.This study has provided some impressive results and findings and contributed to both theoretical and practical aspects of literature by providing empirical evidence that GHRM has a significant positive impact on environmental performance(? = 0.67,p ?0.001)and shows a 45%of the variance associated with organisational environmental performance is accounted for by GHRM.Therefore,the result suggests that the more GHRM practices are perceived to be sound and effective by employees the more likely to improve the environmental performance of an organisation.