Promoting Green HRM Practices and Sustainable Behaviors among Employees: Analyzing the Role of Employee Engagement and Ethical Leadership

Abstract

Environmental sustainability has become a major issue in both policymaking and in the way businesses manage their operations. The sustainability of a business's operations is largely dependent upon its employees translating policy into daily practice. This is especially true for knowledge-based industries such as Information Technology (IT), where the workforce is responsible for implementing these policies. Green HR practices allow businesses to integrate environmental concerns into all aspects of their employee management; i.e., hiring, development, performance management, evaluation, employee participation, and compensation. However, simply having green HR practices does not guarantee that employees will act sustainably. Therefore, this study investigates the impact of green HR practices on employee sustainable behaviors (ESBs). Additionally, this study explores the mediating role of employee engagement in the relationship between green HR practices and ESBs and how ethical leadership moderates the relationship between employee engagement and ESBs. A quantitative, cross-sectional research methodology was employed to collect primary data from 154 IT employees located in the Delhi-NCR area via a structured questionnaire. Convenience sampling was utilized to obtain the sample. The data collected were analyzed using SmartPLS 4. The findings indicate that GHRM practices have a significant positive effect on Employee Engagement (β = 0.163, p < 0.05) and Employee Sustainable Behavior (β = 0.184, p < 0.05). Employee Engagement also has a significant positive influence on Employee Sustainable Behavior (β = 0.262, p < 0.01). The indirect influence of GHRM on ESB via Employee Engagement was favourable; however statistically insignificant. The moderating role of Ethical Leadership on the connection between GHRM and Employee Engagement is significant (β = 0.228, p < 0.01). This shows that ethical leadership increases the efficiency of the GHRM initiatives in enhancing employee engagement. In this way, the paper contributes to the development of sustainable HRM theory through establishing an empirical link between GHRM and sustainable employee behavior. The results indicate that organisations ought to amalgamate formal green HR frameworks with ethical and sustainability-oriented leadership to foster environmentally responsible conduct.