Raising the Curtain in People Management by Exploring How Sustainable HRM Translates to Practice: The Case of Lithuanian Organizations

Abstract

Arguing for the necessity to re-think human resource management (HRM), as human resources are becoming scarce, HRM practices themselves can be even harmful for employees, and the mainstream HRM is more interested not in the employee well-being, but in the search for the link between HRM and performance, the paper introduces sustainable HRM as an alternative approach to people management. Sustainable HRM is seen as a design option, which allows one to maintain, renew and restore human resources. Although previous works have broadened the understanding of the meaning given to sustainable HRM and its core characteristics, research into how sustainable HRM translates into practice is still lacking. Thus, the purpose of the paper is to reveal the practices through which 11 characteristics of sustainable HRM are expressed in real people management in organizations. In doing this, qualitative data were collected from Lithuanian organizations using semi-structured interviews with 19 human resource (HR) managers. The research indicated a variety of applied practices, which differ by maturity. Care of employees, profitability, external partnership, fairness and equality, and employee development were revealed as the characteristics of sustainable HRM most explicitly expressed through HRM practices. Nonetheless, the organizations need more heterogeneous HRM activities, which simultaneously consider the economy, environment, society, and human aspects.

Designing Sustainable HRM: The Core Characteristics of Emerging Field

“…However, having this in mind, it is no less important that sustainable HRM should have clear daily practices rather than reflect a "good catalog of intention". For instance, talking about the care of employee practices that are related to healthy employees, employee-friendly physical workspace, work-life balance, constructive stress management, attention to employees, or adequate workload could be implemented [25]. Moreover, challenges related to digital age and new emerging technologies need to be included when talking about sustainability in HRM.…”

“…The research on sustainability in HRM covers numerous related topics such as Sustainable HRM [19,[22][23][24][25][26], green HRM [27][28][29], socially responsible HRM [30][31][32][33][34], and ethical HRM [35][36][37] depending on the key focus of the approach. The presented paper focuses on sustainable HRM following a definition recently provided by Ehnert et al [38] considering sustainable HRM "as the adoption of HRM strategies and practices that enable the achievement of financial, social and ecological goals, with an impact inside and outside of the organisation and over a long-term time horizon while controlling for unintended side effects and negative feedback."…”

Linking Sustainable Human Resource Management in Hospitality: An Empirical Investigation of the Integrated Mediated Moderation Model

“…The meaning of sustainable human resource management is obtaining and sustaining of a necessary competitive advantage from a great many valuable, satisfied and committed employees with effective people management practices [1,3,13]. This concept has been widely used for human outcomes which benefit long term sustainable performance in organizations [1,4]. Plenty of terms have been adopted to connect sustainability and human resource management activities including work satisfaction [14][15][16], a knowledge sharing system [17][18][19], the abilities of innovation [3,20,21], and performance at work [5,22,23] These terms may display in diverse approaches for organizational sustainable effectiveness, however, there has been no attempt to integrate them into a research framework to better investigate human and social outcomes particularly in hospitality sectors.…”

“…Unlike traditional strategic human resource management practices or policies which focus on ultimate financial and market performance in organizations, sustainable human resource management stresses the importance of managing working people in organizations with sustainable outcomes [1,3]. In other words, sustainable human resource management demonstrates a novel perspective and meanings for long-term development and renewal in the relationship between sustainability and human resource management [2,4,5]. In addition, knowledge workers are the essential ingredients of the modern economy [6].…”

Perceived Serviceability of Outplacement Programs as a Part of Sustainable Human Resource Management

“…Sustainable human resource management can be considered as an alternative approach to mainstream human resource activities. Sustainable human resource management is seen as an alternative care-oriented option and approach to maintain employees and restore human resources [26]. Sustainable human resource management puts the focus on networking and external relationship into enterprise human resource management [27].…”