Sustainability-Oriented Human Resource Management

At present,with the overlapping of the century-old changes and the COVID-19,the world has entered a period of turbulent changes,and human social development is facing more instability and uncertainty,the issue of sustainable development has never attracted more attention than today.Since the World Commission on Environment and Development put forward the concept of sustainable development in 1987,it has brought new opportunities for enterprises to achieve sustainable business model innovation.Given that human resource management carries the necessary activities and competitive resources required for organizations to achieve sustainable development.Therefore,the primary issue to achieve sustainable organizational development is to build a new development model of HRM.As a result,sustainability-oriented human resource management emerged at the historic moment.This is a new management model that combines the development concept of “sustainability” with the management concept of“people are the purpose”,and promotes the reshaping of employee management from the perspective of sustainable development.With regard to sustainability-oriented HRM,it is important not to talk,but to act.And the reality is that the process of promoting sustainability-oriented HRM is difficult.The root cause is that this management model advocates the value realization of human resources over the financial benefits of the enterprise,which largely contradicts the short-term profit-oriented business philosophy.With the Chinese government signaling the acceleration of people-centered sustainable development,and in the face of such realities as structural labor shortages and worsening work-related health problems,companies need to reverse their traditional strategic thinking and seek a more sustainable HRM model to achieve sustainable human development.In recent years,human sustainability has become the focus of theoretical research in the field of organizational management,attracting more and more scholars as a breakthrough in understanding sustainability-oriented HRM.Among them,the studies of stakeholder theory and sustainability theory are the most representative.Employees as the key stakeholder in building an organization’s sustainable competitive advantage,an organization’s sustainable development model is often linked to stakeholders such as shareholders,customers or social groups,and the key role of employees is somewhat neglected.In addition to this,research on sustainability theory is based on a sustainable workforce perspective,emphasizing that employees have positive energy,vitality and resources,calling for embedding the concepts of decent work and healthy work in the field of HRM,and successively deriving conceptualized forms such as HR sustainability,sustainable management of HRs,sustainable work system,and sustainable HRM.Although theoretical studies suggest that sustainability-oriented HRM can increase the possibility of organizational sustainability with individual sustainability by intervening in employees’ psychology and behavior,and has superior effectiveness in building sustainable competitive advantage.However,most of these inferences are conceptual and exploratory in nature and lack empirical evidence to support them.In addition to the lack of measurement tools,they reflect the fact that the theoretical research on sustainability-oriented HRM,as a new HRM model,is still in a “jungle” state,and there is an urgent need to systematically sort out its conceptual connotations,and develop measurement tools based on deeper exploration of its structural characteristics in order to logically construct and evaluate its implementation effects.Facing the practical and theoretical dilemmas,this study attempts to investigate sustainability-oriented HRM in the following three aspects: first,to clarify the conceptual connotation and structural dimensions of sustainability-oriented HRM.This involves answering the questions of what sustainability is and how it relates to HRM,as well as identifying the conceptual content,characteristics,dimensions,and measurement of sustainability-oriented HRM.In this regard,this study combines interview materials,existing literature,and Chinese corporate sustainability reports to conduct a text coding analysis and lay the theoretical foundation for the development of a sustainability-oriented HRM scale.Second,a measurement instrument for sustainability-oriented HRM is developed.This involved the formation of items for the measurement of sustainability-oriented HRM.Based on the classical scale development procedure,this study not only refined the initial items obtained from the qualitative study,but also improved the validity and credibility of the scale development with the help of mathematical and statistical methods(e.g.,exploratory factor analysis,validation factor analysis).Finally,based on the perspective of employees’ perceptions,this study constructs a multi-temporal moderated mediation model under the framework of social cognitive theory to demonstrate the logical relationship between perceptions of sustainability-oriented HRM and employees’ job performance,career sustainability and psychological well-being,and further reveals the mediating role of employees’ psychological capital in the above relationships and the moderating role of learning goal orientation.Through qualitative scale development and empirical model testing,this study concludes that(1)sustainability-oriented HRM is a series of HRM activities that upholds the concept of sustainable development and guides employees in a way that does not detract from the current performance goals and future development needs of the organization,and achieves sustainable development of individuals,taking into account social and ecological benefits.(2)Sustainability-oriented HRM measurement is a higher-order concept consisting of6 dimensions(sustained protection of labor rights and interests,sustained learning and development,sustained guarding of employee health,sustained fulfillment of social responsibility,sustained maintenance of relationship balance,and sustained development of management concept)and measured by 18 question items.(3)Employee perceived sustainability-oriented HRM can significantly improve their job performance,career sustainability,and psychological well-being levels,while psychological capital has a significant mediating role in the above processes,and individual learning goal orientation plays a reinforcing role in the perceived implementation effect of sustainability-oriented HRM.The innovations are as follows: First,the connotation of the concept of sustainability-oriented HRM is clarified.This study focuses on this new HRM model as an extension of the “people-oriented” management concept,which is manifested by grafting the concept of sustainable human development onto HRM activities and integrating Chinese enterprise management practices to build its local conceptual connotation,providing more reference value for people to understand sustainability-oriented HRM.Second,develop a measurement tool for sustainability-oriented HRM.Considering that the existing measurement of sustainability-oriented HRM mainly relies on objective economic indicators or on HRM “bundles”,which are cumbersome and have incomplete content structures.This study uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to develop a local measurement scale for sustainability-oriented HRM,which is a breakthrough from existing measurement methods and provides a tool measuring employees’ perceptions of individual-level empirical studies.Third,it reveals the microscopic mechanism of action of sustainability-oriented HRM.Previous studies have mainly constructed models of the effects of sustainability-oriented HRM through theoretical deduction or commentary based on macro-strategic perspectives.In view of the fact that sustainability-oriented HRM is a topic with frontier in the discipline,especially in view of the lack of domestic research.This study focuses on employee perceptions and constructs a theoretical model of sustainability-oriented HRM based on social cognitive theory,which provides more rigorous empirical evidence for the existing qualitative findings and enriches the theoretical results of sustainability-oriented HRM.The contributions of this study are mainly in theoretical and practical parts.In terms of theory,this study provides a systematic study of sustainability-oriented HRM,responding to the controversies of existing studies on the conceptual content,structural dimensions,and measurement tools,as well as validating the existing theoretical speculations on the effects of sustainability-oriented HRM on individual psychology and behavior.In terms of practice,this study corresponds to the Chinese government’s spirit of fully implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development from the perspective of HRM discipline,emphasizing the transformation and upgrading of HRM and the sustainable development of individuals in organizations,and provides actionable tools for corporate management practices to achieve sustainable employee management,sustainable job design,and sustainable competitive advantage building.