Two-decade journey of green human resource management research: a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Purpose

During the past decade, the green workplace has attracted the attention of academics and industry alike. As a result, new research areas like green human resource management (GHRM) started emerging. Green workplace means greening of traditional business functions, namely, human resource management, marketing, operations and supply chain. GHRM can play a strategic role in enabling organizations to implement and formulate sustainable strategies and help them achieve corporate sustainability. This paper helps understand the GHRM scholarship and provides an up-to-date account of GHRM practices.

Design/methodology/approach

In this paper, the authors have adopted the bibliometric analysis method to analyse and draw inferences from 247 articles retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS) database for the time horizon of almost two decades: 2005 to June 2021. The methodology's schematic view comprises four steps: data collection, data analysis, data visualization and interpretation. The present study intends to understand GHRM scholarship using Bibliometric R-package and VOSviewer software.

Findings

The study offers some interesting insights that may help scholars, line managers and top management to conceptualize the GHRM practices in their organization, which is currently limited to a few HR practices (hiring, training and reward), geographies, developed countries and industries. These can be extended to other HR practices (e.g. industrial relations). In addition, this paper contributes to the GHRM literature in identifying the keywords, authors, journals, intellectual, conceptual and social structure.

Research limitations/implications

The study underpins the research in the area of GHRM in order to understand the trends on this topic over the past 17 years in terms of prolific authors, most impactful journals, key themes and the field's intellectual and social structure. The study indicates that this field is still in its development stage. Hence, there is a need for more arduous research on the topic to help develop a better understanding of this new field.

Originality/value

The paper helps understand green practices in human resource functions, focusing on corporate sustainability goals. It helps the line managers and top management make GHRM a central function for achieving sustainability goals. In addition, these findings can be a road map for the researchers to investigate the field of GHRM further.

Citation

Bahuguna, P.C., Srivastava, R. and Tiwari, S. (2023), "Two-decade journey of green human resource management research: a bibliometric analysis", Benchmarking: An International Journal, Vol. 30 No. 2, pp. 585-602. https://doi.org/10.1108/BIJ-10-2021-0619