Green Human Resource Management: a critical study on how organisation perceive its ability to improve the environmental performance of a business practice

The corporate world is moving towards the green economy and it becomes more conscious about the growing importance of integration of environmental Management and Human Resource Management (HRM). The HRM has a promising potential in improving organisation's environmental performance however, there are many gaps that exist in the green HRM literature and the aspect of sustainability requires further development in the studies of contemporary HRM practices. Therefore, the aim of the research is to explore how HR departments can manage the workforce through 'greening' their policies and practices to improve the environmental performance of an organisation. In order to achieve the aim of the project, the primary research was conducted in one of Edinburgh's busiest call centres, where 30 customer service agents participated in the survey, 6 HR professionals and 6 Team Leaders in the semi-structured interviews. The mixed methods research has resulted in the quantitative data, where the answers were calculated and transformed to visual charts, bars or tables, and the qualitative data, where the analysis involved coding, finding patterns, themes, and relationships, so the process led to elaboration that constructed the theory. The green employee' competency framework has emerged as the result of the research outlining the knowledge, skills, and behaviours. Furthermore, the case study has demonstrated that the green HRM theory does not always apply in the contemporary business practice and the challenges to embedding the green strategy have been exposed, showing the areas for further development. The limitation of the research was the fact it was conducted in one company thus the further research should be performed in a greater number of the firms as that would give an opportunity to generalise the data to the wider population and build on the green competency framework that has emerged from this case study.ba_busmanunpub2641_ethesesunpu