Sustainable HRM

Abstract

Sustainability creates tensions since organizations need to simultaneously address multiple desirable but conflicting economic, environmental, and social outcomes at the company and societal levels. Consequently, a sustainable human resource management (HRM) must address several contradictions or paradoxes, especially in crisis times as the COVID-19 pandemic proposed to us. Ehnert identified three key paradoxes of a sustainable HRM (Su-HRM): Tensions between deploying human resources efficiently and maintaining their capabilities. Tensions between economic rationality and relational rationality (here, the main aim is to maintain social legitimacy by acting responsibly). Tensions between short and long-term effects. Hence, a sustainable approach to HRM must address the goal of achieving a mutual benefit for employers and employees, where the satisfaction of individual needs must be aligned with the maintenance of business competitiveness. A mutual benefit “reflects the type of opportunities available for two or more interdependent parties to establish jointly shared benefits despite having potentially divergent interests” (p. 354). Boxall proposes three key conditions for achieving a mutual benefit: (a) a capability match, (b) a commitment match, and (c) a contribution match. Combining the three key paradoxes and the three key conditions, the chapter intends to explore how modern (post-COVID-19) organizations might solve these paradoxes and accomplish these conditions with a different mutual approach to a Su-HRM, implying HR practices or HR systems as configurations of HR practices that promote well-being and human flourishing are just “the right thing[s] to do on ethical grounds” (p. 34) because the needs of employees are still too often neglected. Organizations that address mutual benefits in employment relationships outperform those that do not in terms of individual performance and sustainability.