Green HRM as a Sustainability Catalyst: How Green Innovation Mediates the People–Planet Nexus in Emerging Economy Firms

Abstract

Purpose: India's industrial sector now accounts for roughly a quarter of the country's total greenhouse gas output, yet the human resource function — which shapes who gets hired, how they are trained, what they are measured on, and how they are rewarded — remains an underutilised lever in corporate sustainability strategy. This study asks a pointed question: can deliberately greening HR systems push firms measurably closer to triple-bottom-line sustainability, and does green innovation explain why? We examine these questions across manufacturing, IT, and FMCG firms in India using a theoretically grounded, multi-wave empirical design. Design/Methodology/Approach: To sidestep the common method bias that plagues single-wave self-report studies, data were collected in two waves separated by eight weeks. At Wave 1, 342 managers reported on their firms' GHRM practices and green innovation activity. At Wave 2, the same respondents rated sustainability outcomes across environmental, social, and economic dimensions. After removing incomplete responses, 302 usable observations remained. PLS-SEM with 5,000-resample bias-corrected bootstrapping was used for hypothesis testing. Findings: Four GHRM practices — green recruitment and selection, training and development, performance management, and compensation — each independently predict sustainability performance, with green training carrying the heaviest weight (β = 0.26, p < .001). More substantively, green innovation fully mediates the GHRM–sustainability relationship: the indirect pathway accounts for β = 0.24 (95% BC-CI [0.17, 0.31]), leaving the model explaining 64% of sustainability variance. Critically, GHRM advances all three TBL pillars — environmental, social, and economic — not merely the ecological dimension most commonly studied. Practical Implications: Indian firms investing in green workforce systems should treat green innovation as the mechanism they are trying to activate, not a hoped-for side effect. Green training and development warrants priority because it is the single practice with the strongest TBL return. Practical prescriptions differ meaningfully by sector: manufacturers should anchor GHRM in environmental performance metrics; IT firms will see the highest returns in social sustainability; FMCG firms benefit from balanced TBL integration. Originality/Value: This paper contributes on three fronts. First, it disaggregates both GHRM and sustainability into theoretically meaningful sub-dimensions, resolving an aggregation problem that has obscured differential effects in prior work. Second, the time-lagged design provides stronger causal traction than any comparable study in the Indian GHRM literature. Third, by confirming full mediation of green innovation, the study repositions this construct from a downstream outcome to a necessary condition for GHRM-driven sustainability gains.