Fostering Corporate Sustainability

The central challenge for HRM under the corporate sustainability agenda is to move organizations to adopt sustainable practices and structures towards different organizational strategies and create a climate whereby employees’ potential can be released for a system of renewal and regeneration. However, there is a gap between organization’s intention to adopt sustainable HRM and some practical strategies or management tools for them to achieve such goals. Therefore, this chapter is primarily focused on the challenging question of how to realize sustainable HRM for the fostering of corporate sustainability. We argue that for organizations with varied levels of commitment to sustainability and different features of HRM involvement, their approaches to implementing sustainable HRM can be quite different. A typology of firms’ sustainable HRM is thus developed and two different approaches are proposed: an integrative diagnostic approach which is more in line with interpretive systems theory and the CAS approach based on complexity theory, with a focus on the latter. The chapter concludes with implications and direction for future research and practice.