Islamic Spiritual Leadership, Green HRM, and Workplace Green Behavior in Environmental Sustainability: A Review of Islamic Banking Practice

Abstract

This review is aimed to establish a new, more detailed literature synthesis on Islamic Spiritual Leadership (ISL), Green Human Resource Management (GHRM), Workplace Green Behavior (WGB), and Environmental Sustainability Practices (ESP) in Islamic banking, while taking the case of Islami Bank Bangladesh Limited (IBBL) in Dhaka City as an empirical example. This is not only a synthesis that strengthens the relationship between ISL-GHRM-WGB-ESP, as previously reported in the reviews, but it also incorporates over two dozen peer-reviewed scholarly sources published mainly in the last six years (2020–2026), ranging from meta-analytical studies of spiritual leadership, bibliometric mapping of GHRM scholarship, to empirical research on Islamic work ethic and religiosity in shaping pro-environmental behavior. The review is presented in eleven sections, which are designed to provide a clearer view of the evidence for each particular claim than was previously provided in narrative reviews. The results have been consistent with the notion that ISL and GHRM are complementary antecedents of ESP, and that this link is largely mediated by WGB. The review further reveals that Islamic work ethic and religiosity are boundary conditions that enhance the ISL-WGB relationship in organizations with Muslim majority, which is also not included in the previous western-based GHRM models. To facilitate more rigorous testing of the propositions presented in the literature and the structured future-research agenda, a discussion of the methodological limitations of the review is explicitly discussed.