With the growing awareness of how economic development is contributing to environmental degradation and climate change, concerns about long-term sustainability are raising new ethical issues for organizations and their members, as well as for society as a whole. Against this backdrop, green (environmentally-focused) human resource management (GHRM) has been increasingly promoted over the past decade as a proactive response that organizations can take to enhance environmental performance. Underlying the emergence of GHRM is an assumption that it can address a firm’s specific challenge of managing environmental concerns through a set of HRM practices that explicitly consider the firm’s environmental goals. However prior studies have focused primarily on either descriptive exploration of the existence of HRM practices that target environmental issues or the influence of a limited set of these HRM practices. Several theoretical and practical issues remain under-specified, including whether and how GHRM influences a firm’s performance (including environmental performance and financial performance). Research on GHRM introduces new ideas and issues that are only beginning to be studied by HRM scholars as they realize the strategic importance of environmental management for building sustainable organizations. Shuang outlined the development of the GHRM field with reference to her recent review paper on GHRM, and shared three of her projects that unfold the underlying mechanisms and boundary conditions of GHRM for firms’ performance and employees’ green behavior.

Shuang Ren is a senior lecturer at Deakin Business School, Deakin University. She obtained her doctoral degree in human resource management at the University of Melbourne (2010–2013) and worked as a post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Ethical Leadership at the University of Melbourne prior to joining Deakin. Shuang’s research areas include strategic human resource management, human resource development (particularly leader development) and business leadership in China. She is a recipient of Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management Early Career Researcher Award in 2015 and Faculty Researcher Award in 2017.