Green Human Resource Management in the East and West

Resumo

The need for paying attention to sustainable development, green issues, and environmental changes is felt more day by day while in green human resource management (GHRM) and greening organizations' human resources are issues paid attention to by different countries seeking to achieve sustainable development and to help preserve the environment. The main purpose of the present study is to perform a systematic review on previously conducted GHRM studies in the east and west during the past ten years. For researchers and managers, this in fact is roughly the best way to share the advantageous information contained by the studies of interest while it also tries to review the findings of various researches in order to signify the similarities and differences that exist in their results, and to underscore the existing gaps. The present research has showed that paying attention to GHRM has significantly increased in east since 2014 while prior to this date, most of the related studies were conducted in the west. For eastern researchers the most interesting functions were respectively education and development (72%), performance management (60%), and rewarding and compensation (56%) as well as other more attention requiring functions including socialization (12%), job analysis (8%), employee retention (8%), and discipline management (4%). On the other hand, the most interesting functions for western researchers were respectively selection and recruiting (61.54%), education and development (53.85%), performance management (53.85%), compensation (53.85%) in addition to other more attention requiring functions including discipline management (0%), socialization (7.69%), employee retention (7.69%), and job analysis (15.38%). The most referred to gaps between the western and eastern studies have turned out to be lack of comprehensive studies in east in addition to the lack of a cross-cultural model which can be utilized for execution of GHRM proportional to the cultures of various different countries. As other gaps in the east it can be referred to cumbersome rules, excessive bureaucracy and hierarchies, lack of managers' support for green plans, and the lack of GHRM training courses, whereas the gaps in the west include lack of comparisons between sustainable and non-sustainable organziations, insufficiency of GHRM related studies, existing of excessive hierarchies in some countries including Brazil, inadequate consideration for the details of GHRM including the manners of absorption of green employees, especially those interested in working with lower wages, and inadequacy of case studies. In the present studies the countries located in Asia are referred to as the east and the countries located in Europe and America continents are referred to as the west.