Advancing corporate environmental performance through green human resource management and employee pro-environmental behavior: a narrative review

1 Introduction

The accelerating pace of climate change, resource depletion, and environmental pollution has positioned firms as both a principal source of environmental pressure and an indispensable actor in environmental governance. As emissions reduction, resource efficiency, pollution control, and environmental compliance increasingly harden into binding constraints, the capacity of organizations to translate environmental goals into measurable performance improvements no longer depends solely on the adoption of cleaner technologies or the imposition of external regulation. It rests to an ever greater degree on the transformation of human and behavioral resources within the organization (Awwad Al-Shammari et al., 2022). Corporate environmental performance, encompassing reductions in carbon emissions and energy consumption, resource recycling, pollution prevention, and environmental compliance, should therefore serve as the analytical endpoint of research in this domain.

Among the many pathways leading to this outcome, a distinctively human organizational route has long been undervalued. Green human resource management (GHRM) provides human support for environmental goals by embedding environmental values into recruitment, training, performance appraisal, compensation, and employee involvement (Renwick et al., 2013; Ren et al., 2018). Employee pro-environmental behavior (PEB) constitutes the critical behavioral link through which these management practices are converted into quantifiable environmental outcomes (Robertson and Barling, 2013; Li et al., 2023). Clarifying the mechanisms through which, and the conditions under which, GHRM improves environmental performance therefore carries direct practical significance for corporate environmental governance (Hameed et al., 2023).

Over the past decade, GHRM scholarship has accumulated a substantial body of literature reviews, yet notable gaps in existing integration remain. Most reviews adopt a systematic or bibliometric orientation, emphasizing the mapping of thematic distributions and publication trends (Amrutha and Geetha, 2020; Pham et al., 2020; Yong et al., 2020; Paulet et al., 2021; Miah et al., 2024). The few integrations with a broader scope direct their outcome toward organizational sustainability or the triple bottom line (Efranto et al., 2026). More tellingly, meta-analytic evidence indicates that bundling heterogeneous sustainability dimensions into a composite index dilutes domain-specific effect signals (Bindeeba et al., 2025a). Recent reviews have begun to move in this direction: a comprehensive review synthesizes GHRM and environmental performance directly (Tahir et al., 2024), and meta-analytic work already treats environmental performance as a distinct outcome (Bindeeba et al., 2025a). What remains comparatively underdeveloped is a single narrative account that fixes corporate environmental performance as the explicit endpoint while integrating the multiple mediating pathways together with boundary conditions spanning the individual, leadership, organizational, and institutional levels.

This review seeks to address these gaps and to advance understanding on three fronts. It fixes the dependent construct as corporate environmental performance, distinguishing it from green corporate social responsibility and from composite sustainable performance, thereby aligning with the central concern of environmental science with what improves environmental outcomes. On this foundation, the review thematically synthesizes the multiple mediating mechanisms through which GHRM reaches environmental performance, namely green psychological climate, green self-efficacy and commitment, green organizational culture, and environmental knowledge and green innovation, and positions employee PEB as the proximal behavioral pathway connecting management practice to measurable environmental outcomes (Dumont et al., 2017; Norton et al., 2017). It further advances an integrative framework that incorporates boundary conditions at the individual, leadership, organizational, and institutional levels, and derives from this framework a research and policy agenda oriented toward emissions reduction and environmental governance.

This review is narrative and integrative in nature. The literature search drew primarily on Scopus and Web of Science, supplemented by Google Scholar, and concentrated on studies published between January 2015 and December 2025, a window chosen because the consolidation of GHRM as a distinct field and the bulk of empirical work on employee green behavior fall within it, supplemented by foundational theoretical works published earlier and by relevant contributions available up to the search date in 2026, on themes including green HRM, employee pro-environmental behavior, green psychological climate, and corporate environmental performance. The analysis employs thematic synthesis rather than exhaustive PRISMA-style screening, makes no claim of systematic coverage, and does not draw causal inference, so the cited literature is illustrative rather than comprehensive. The remainder of the review defines the three core constructs and organizes GHRM practices through the ability motivation opportunity (AMO) framework, examines the multiple mediating mechanisms, clarifies the behavioral pathway role of PEB, analyzes boundary conditions across four levels, and finally consolidates these elements into an analytical framework accompanied by directions for future research.

The identification of literature followed a purposive, non-exhaustive procedure appropriate to a narrative review. Search strings paired green HRM and its variants (green human resource management, green HRM, environmental human resource management, sustainable HRM) with terms capturing the mediating and outcome constructs, including employee green behavior, organizational citizenship behavior for the environment, green psychological climate, green self-efficacy, green organizational culture, environmental knowledge, green innovation, and corporate environmental performance. Scopus and Web of Science served as the primary databases and Google Scholar as a supplementary source, and the databases were last consulted in 2026. Retained items were peer-reviewed journal articles and authoritative reviews or meta-analyses written in English that addressed at least one link among GHRM, the mediating mechanisms, employee pro-environmental behavior, and corporate environmental performance; conference abstracts, non-peer-reviewed gray literature, and studies without a clear connection to this chain were set aside, except for a small number of foundational theoretical works retained regardless of date. Several hundred records were screened at the title and abstract level and a subset read in full, from which roughly seventy-five sources were retained for the synthesis. Rather than an exhaustive census, representative studies were selected on the basis of thematic coverage, methodological contribution (for instance, scale-development studies and meta-analyses), and citation influence, and were then organized through thematic synthesis around the constructs, mechanisms, behavioral pathway, and boundary conditions that structure this review.

2 Conceptual foundations and GHRM practices

2.1 Defining the three core constructs

Delineating the boundaries of the three core constructs is a prerequisite for integrating mechanisms and boundary conditions. GHRM refers to a coherent bundle of practices that embed environmental sustainability principles into human resource functions and policies, encompassing green recruitment, training, performance appraisal, compensation, and employee involvement, with the aim of cultivating employee environmental awareness and capability and thereby reducing the environmental impact of the organization (Renwick et al., 2013; Tang et al., 2018), building on earlier work establishing the role of HRM across the successive stages of corporate environmental management (Jabbour et al., 2010). Employee PEB denotes individual actions in the workplace that proactively reduce environmental burden and protect environmental quality, and it is commonly distinguished into task-related behavior that complies with environmental procedures and voluntary behavior that exceeds formal role requirements (Robertson and Barling, 2013; Boiral, 2009; Zacher et al., 2023). Corporate environmental performance refers to the actual achievements of an organization in environmental management, measured through objective or near-objective indicators such as reductions in carbon emissions and energy consumption, resource recycling, pollution prevention, environmental compliance, and eco-certification (Kim et al., 2019).

A measurement caveat accompanies this definition. Objective environmental performance refers to verified outcomes such as measured emissions, energy and water use, waste generation, and compliance records, whereas perceived environmental performance is captured through validated manager or employee rating scales. The two are not interchangeable, and several studies synthesized here rely on the perceptual form even though the construct is defined in objective terms, a tension revisited in the future agenda.

Treating corporate environmental performance as a distinct construct is central to the framing of this review. Existing studies frequently generalize the outcome as green corporate social responsibility or composite sustainable performance, yet meta-analytic evidence demonstrates that bundling heterogeneous dimensions dilutes domain-specific effect signals and allows the true magnitude of environmental improvement to be obscured by economic and social dimensions (Bindeeba et al., 2025a). Taking environmental performance as the explicit endpoint avoids this measurement pitfall and aligns with the central concern of environmental science with what improves environmental outcomes. The operational definitions of the three constructs and their representative measurement scales are summarized in Table 1.

Table 1. Definitions of the three core constructs and their representative measurement scales.

2.2 Theoretical lenses

Explaining how GHRM is associated with environmental performance requires multiple theoretical lenses, among which the ability motivation opportunity (AMO) framework constitutes the central axis. The AMO framework holds that employee performance reflects the joint influence of ability, motivation, and opportunity (Appelbaum et al., 2001). Green recruitment and training shape the ability of employees to identify and resolve environmental problems, green performance appraisal and compensation strengthen their motivation to participate in environmental action, and employee involvement provides the opportunity to enact environmental behavior. This logic of being able to act, being willing to act, and having the opportunity to act corresponds directly to GHRM practices and therefore serves as the natural scaffold for organizing the practice-oriented synthesis that follows (Ren et al., 2018).

Around this central axis, several mid-range theories offer complementary mechanistic explanations. Social exchange theory reveals how employees reciprocate the environmental concern of the organization through pro-environmental effort, while social identity theory explains how employees spontaneously enact environmental behavior when they identify with the green values of the organization (Ashforth and Mael, 1989). Social cognitive theory emphasizes that organizational environmental policies shape the green cognition and behavior of employees through observational learning (Dumont et al., 2017). The theory of planned behavior proceeds from individual intention, clarifying how attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control drive pro-environmental intention (Ajzen, 1991), a logic applied to GHRM in evidence that perceived GHRM shapes green innovative behavior among employees through planned-behavior mechanisms (Song et al., 2022), whereas the resource-based view operates at the firm level, treating green human capital as a valuable, rare, and inimitable strategic resource that underpins sustained environmental competitive advantage, while the dynamic capabilities perspective extends this logic to the capacity of the firm to renew green competencies over time (Barney, 1991; Teece et al., 1997), a capacity reflected in the link between green human resources, green ambidexterity, and environmental performance (Ubeda-Garcia et al., 2022). This theoretical spectrum, extending from micro-level intention through meso-level capability to macro-level resources, provides multilevel support for the analysis of mechanisms and boundaries that follows.

2.3 Green HRM practices through the AMO framework

Following the three dimensions of ability, motivation, and opportunity, the core practices of GHRM can be systematically mapped onto their respective operative pathways, each linked back to its environmental outcome (Figure 1).

Along the ability dimension, green recruitment incorporates environmental values and competencies into selection criteria, enhancing the initial capacity of employees to enact environmental behavior at the point of entry while strengthening the attractiveness of the organization to environmentally sensitive talent (Yusliza et al., 2019). Green training deepens environmental competence through the transfer of environmental knowledge and skills and is widely regarded as one of the most extensively adopted and best-supported GHRM practices (Jabbour and Santos, 2008). A cautionary note is warranted: where the green employer brand becomes decoupled from actual practice, the environmental commitments made during recruitment may deteriorate into greenwashing, and training that exceeds employee capacity without adequate support may induce green fatigue and thereby weaken behavioral intention.

Along the motivation dimension, green performance appraisal incorporates environmental goals into the evaluation system, signaling to employees that their environmental contributions are monitored and valued and thereby reinforcing their willingness to sustain environmental effort (Tang et al., 2018), while green compensation further consolidates this motivation through financial and non-financial rewards (Pinzone et al., 2016). Excessive reliance on extrinsic rewards nonetheless carries the risk of crowding out intrinsic motivation, for when environmental behavior is driven solely by reward and sanction rather than by internalized environmental values, lasting behavioral change tends to prove difficult to maintain.

Along the opportunity dimension, employee involvement, including green teams, suggestion schemes, and consultation on environmental decisions, provides a platform through which employees translate environmental intention into practice and cultivates a sense of ownership and commitment through social exchange mechanisms (Ren et al., 2018). In the absence of opportunities for involvement, the environmental potential of employees is difficult to release even where ability and motivation are present. The correspondence between the various practices and the AMO dimensions, their pathways toward environmental outcomes, and representative studies are summarized in Table 2.

Table 2. Green HRM practices organized by AMO dimension, with linkages to environmental outcomes and References.

3 Mediating mechanisms

GHRM is rarely associated with environmental performance directly; its influence is instead relayed through a series of psychological, cultural, and cognitive innovation mechanisms. Clarifying how these mediators may translate management practice into measurable environmental outcomes is central to understanding the sources of GHRM efficacy; conceptual frameworks have advanced analogous mediated pathways in service sectors such as healthcare (Mousa and Othman, 2020).

3.1 Green psychological climate

Green psychological climate refers, at the individual level, to an employee's own perception of the extent to which the organization values environmental sustainability; when such perceptions are shared and aggregated across employees they form a collective or organizational green climate, and the literature uses terms such as pro-environmental organizational climate and green work climate for this shared form (Norton et al., 2014; Zientara and Zamojska, 2018). When GHRM continuously signals through policies, processes, and incentives that environmental matters are valued, employees form a shared green climate through social interaction, and this climate in turn guides their pro-environmental behavior, constituting one of the most frequently examined mediating pathways between GHRM and employee green behavior (Dumont et al., 2017; Norton et al., 2017). Empirical research shows that green psychological climate mediates the influence of GHRM on employee pro-environmental behavior and, through behavior, transmits to environmental performance (Li et al., 2023; Hameed et al., 2023), while organizational environmental strategy likewise stimulates voluntary environmental behavior through a psychological green climate (Das et al., 2019). Green psychological climate thus constitutes the mechanism most proximate to the perceptual level within this conceptual pathway.

3.2 Green self-efficacy, passion, and commitment

Beneath this shared climate, the individual psychological resources of employees further mediate the influence of GHRM. Green self-efficacy reflects the belief of employees in their own capacity to accomplish environmental tasks, and green passion embodies their affective investment in and intrinsic motivation toward the environmental cause, with both converting the green orientation of the organization into sustained behavioral drive (Afsar et al., 2016). Related to this, green organizational commitment captures the identification of employees with, and their investment in, the environmental goals of the organization. Research shows that green commitment mediates the influence of GHRM on employee green innovation behavior (Yang and Li, 2023), while green intellectual capital and green behavior transmit GHRM to sustainable performance through serial mediation (Mahmood and Nasir, 2023; Malik et al., 2020). Green work engagement operates as a further individual-level conduit through which GHRM elicits employee green behavior (Aboramadan, 2022). These individual-level resources indicate that the efficacy of GHRM depends not only on the external climate but also on whether it can be internalized into the capability beliefs and affective commitment of employees.

3.3 Green organizational culture as a generative mechanism

Relative to psychological climate and individual resources, green organizational culture resides at a deeper organizational level and denotes the sedimentation of environmental values in the shared assumptions and everyday routines of the organization. GHRM cultivates a green culture supportive of environmental action by embedding environmental values throughout the processes of selecting, developing, and rewarding people, and this culture in turn guides employee behavior and enhances environmental performance (Roscoe et al., 2019). The enabling factors of green culture mediate the influence of GHRM on green competitive advantage (Muisyo et al., 2022), and the association among green culture, innovation, and performance is likewise transmitted through employee commitment (Sharma et al., 2021). A distinction must be drawn: green organizational culture is treated here as a generative mechanism that GHRM produces and that in turn shapes employee behavior, whereas the manner in which pre-existing cultural strength and its attendant resistance to change moderate the influence of GHRM is discussed separately as a boundary condition in Section 5.3, the two belonging to distinct causal roles that should not be conflated.

3.4 Environmental knowledge and green innovation as pathways to performance

At the far end of the mechanistic chain lies the cognitive innovation pathway that links employee cognition to quantifiable environmental improvement. As a cognitive resource cultivated by GHRM, environmental knowledge enhances the capacity of employees to identify and enact environmental behavior and constitutes one of several channels connecting organizational policy to green behavior (Gatersleben et al., 2002; Safari et al., 2018; Hameed et al., 2023). On this foundation, green innovation, encompassing the development and implementation of eco-products, cleaner processes, and environmental management systems, emerges as a particularly well-supported pathway to environmental performance; that green innovation itself yields competitive and performance advantage is a long-established finding (Chen et al., 2006; Zhang et al., 2019), corroborated by meta-analytic evidence on environmental and eco-innovation (Hizarci-Payne et al., 2021; Oduro, 2024). A meta-analysis synthesizing 137 studies and over 167,000 firm-level observations shows that GHRM exerts a strong positive effect on green innovation (β = 0.445) and that green innovation significantly mediates the influence of GHRM on environmental performance (β = 0.056, p < 0.001) (Bindeeba et al., 2025a). A separate meta-analysis of 52 studies and 23,103 observations reports a consistent positive GHRM-green innovation association, with green-linked compensation emerging as the strongest practice-level lever (Bindeeba et al., 2025b). This quantitative evidence is echoed by a range of studies: green transformational leadership and GHRM jointly catalyze green innovation and thereby improve environmental performance (Singh et al., 2020); GHRM transmits to environmental performance through green innovation and environmental strategy (Aftab et al., 2023; Ogiemwonyi et al., 2023); and green innovation mediates the GHRM-performance relationship in manufacturing (Fang et al., 2022; Kanan et al., 2023; Awwad Al-Shammari et al., 2022), automotive operations (Jabbour et al., 2013), small-lodging (Sobaih et al., 2020), and emerging-country (Rana and Arya, 2024) settings, as well as in moderated-mediation models linking strategic and green HRM to environmental performance (Peng et al., 2024; Imran et al., 2023). Green innovation thus emerges as a central pathway associated with GHRM-related gains in environmental outcomes.

3.5 Synthesis: how multiple mediators jointly link GHRM to environmental performance

These mechanisms are not isolated from one another but constitute a nested cascade extending from perception to capability and from culture to innovation. Green psychological climate establishes shared perception, individual self-efficacy and commitment internalize this perception into behavioral drive, green culture consolidates it at the organizational level, and environmental knowledge and green innovation translate this drive into measurable environmental improvement. GHRM is linked to environmental performance through this interwoven bundle of mechanisms rather than through any single pathway.

This process of conversion is nonetheless not without tension. When an organization simultaneously incentivizes green behavior and imposes stringent environmental requirements, a paradox may arise between green motivation and employee well-being, as excessive environmental pressure may induce green fatigue and burnout and thereby erode voluntary environmental investment (Guerci et al., 2016b; Efranto et al., 2026). This paradox indicates that the effective operation of the mediating mechanisms depends on a judicious balancing by the organization of the intrinsic motivation and psychological capacity of employees. The mediating mechanisms and their representative evidence are summarized in Table 3.

Table 3. Mediating mechanisms linking green HRM to corporate environmental performance: an evidence matrix across studies.

4 Employee pro-environmental behavior as the behavioral pathway

If the mediating mechanisms of the preceding section characterize the psychological and organizational sources of GHRM efficacy, employee PEB constitutes an important behavioral pathway through which these mechanisms are frequently realized and through which management investment is often translated into measurable environmental outcomes. Examining PEB in its own right helps to clarify the behavioral logic of the final segment between GHRM and environmental performance.

4.1 Defining and delimiting PEB: task-related vs. proactive behavior

Employee PEB is not a single homogeneous construct but encompasses a behavioral spectrum extending from compliance to spontaneity. Task-related PEB refers to behavior within the scope of formal job responsibilities that complies with environmental procedures, such as sorting waste according to protocol and performing energy-saving operations, its boundaries defined by the formal requirements of the organization (Robertson and Barling, 2013). Proactive PEB exceeds role requirements and constitutes voluntary extra-role effort, often characterized as organizational citizenship behavior for the environment, such as proactively proposing environmental suggestions and spontaneously initiating conservation efforts (Boiral, 2009). The two forms of behavior differ substantively in their motivational basis and organizational implications: task-related behavior secures the implementation of and compliance with environmental procedures, whereas proactive behavior drives environmental innovation and a deeper culture of sustainability. Clarifying this distinction is a prerequisite for understanding how GHRM differentially elicits employee environmental action (Norton et al., 2017).

4.2 PEB as the proximal link to measurable environmental performance

Within the conceptual pathway through which GHRM reaches environmental performance, PEB occupies the position most proximate to the outcome and represents an important behavioral point of association at which management practice is linked to quantifiable environmental improvement. Many of the practices of GHRM and the psychological, cultural, and cognitive mechanisms described in the preceding section are realized through the actual environmental behavior of employees before they translate into objective outcomes such as emissions reduction, energy saving, and pollution control; formal environmental management systems, process redesign, and green innovation can also affect these outcomes without employee behavior serving as the measured pathway. Empirical research repeatedly demonstrates that employee PEB significantly improves corporate environmental performance and mediates the relationship between human resource practices and environmental outcomes (Paillé et al., 2014; Li et al., 2023). For this reason, where employee behavior does not respond, environmental goals may be harder to realize even where sound green policies and a positive psychological climate are in place, which underscores the important, though not exclusive, position of PEB as a behavioral pathway (Veerasamy et al., 2024). Positioning PEB explicitly between mechanisms and performance also provides the conceptual basis for embedding the behavioral segment within the input, mechanism, and outcome chain of the integrative framework that follows.

4.3 Differential pathways feeding task-related vs. proactive PEB

The two forms of pro-environmental behavior are not driven in equal measure by the same set of antecedents but are nourished respectively by different practices and mechanisms. Task-related behavior depends more on the ability and motivation dimensions of the AMO framework, as green training confers on employees the ability to enact environmental procedures, while green performance appraisal and compensation strengthen their motivation to comply with environmental requirements through clear evaluation and reward and sanction (Tang et al., 2018). Proactive behavior is rooted more in the opportunity dimension and in internalized psychological resources, as employee involvement and green teams provide a platform for voluntary environmental action, while green psychological climate, green passion, and commitment internalize external incentives into voluntary investment that exceeds role requirements (Afsar et al., 2016; Yang and Li, 2023). This distinction indicates that reliance on extrinsic reward and sanction alone may secure compliance behavior yet does not necessarily elicit innovative voluntary behavior, and that only by cultivating opportunity and intrinsic identification alongside the provision of ability and motivation can the benefits of both forms of behavior be obtained. These correspondences indicate primary rather than exclusive pathways: meta-analytic evidence shows that individual GHRM practices contribute to both in-role and extra-role green behavior, with performance management relevant across outcomes and compensation carrying considerable weight for extra-role behavior (Guo et al., 2025). The definition and distinction of the two forms of PEB, their association with environmental performance, and their differential antecedents are summarized in Table 4.

Table 4. A typology of employee pro-environmental behavior (task-related vs. proactive) and its links to corporate environmental performance.

5 Boundary conditions

The pathway through which GHRM reaches environmental performance via mediating mechanisms does not operate with equal intensity under all conditions. When its efficacy is strengthened and when it is attenuated depend on a set of cross-level boundary conditions. Examining these conditions across the individual, leadership, organizational, and institutional levels helps to reveal the contextual contingency of GHRM efficacy.

5.1 Individual level: green values and green self-efficacy

Value orientation and capability belief at the individual level constitute the source of moderation most proximate to the employee. Green values reflect the intrinsic environmental concern of employees and are generally held to strengthen the association between organizational green practices and employee behavior, such that individuals holding stronger green values should be more responsive to the signals of GHRM (Chou, 2014). Green self-efficacy is likewise regarded as a potential moderating variable, as the stronger the belief of employees in their own capacity for environmental action, the more likely they are to convert organizational practices into actual behavior (Saeed et al., 2019). This intuitive expectation has nonetheless not received consistent empirical support. In a study set in the Pakistani healthcare context, the moderating role of individual green values in the relationship between pro-environmental behavior and environmental performance was hypothesized but not confirmed by the data (Li et al., 2023). This unsupported result is itself instructive, indicating that the efficacy of individual-level moderation may not be robust and warrants further scrutiny below.

5.2 Leadership level: green transformational leadership and supervisor support

Modeling and support at the leadership level provide a top-down moderating context for GHRM efficacy. Green transformational leadership amplifies the influence of GHRM on employee pro-environmental behavior by articulating an environmental vision, modeling environmental behavior, and motivating employees (Robertson and Barling, 2013). The green traits of leaders act in concert with human resource systems to jointly shape the voluntary green behavior of employees (Zhang et al., 2023), while the interaction among green transformational leadership, GHRM, and environmental knowledge further fosters the development of employee pro-environmental behavior (Farrukh et al., 2022), an effect that extends to the environmental performance of small and medium-sized enterprises when leadership, GHRM, and PEB act together (Perez et al., 2023). This evidence indicates that the environmental leadership of managers can significantly strengthen the behavioral effect of GHRM and constitutes a moderating condition that cannot be overlooked.

5.3 Organizational context: cultural readiness and resistance to change as moderators

The pre-existing cultural foundation and disposition toward change at the organizational level define the internal ground on which GHRM operates. A distinction from Section 3.3 must be drawn: the concern here is not the green culture that GHRM generates but rather the manner in which the pre-existing cultural readiness of the organization and its attendant resistance to change moderate GHRM efficacy. When employees hold a resistant attitude toward environmental change, the association between GHRM and employee behavior is weakened, as research shows that resistance to change significantly and negatively moderates the influence of GHRM on employee behavior (Nejati et al., 2017; Hameed et al., 2023). Notably, the moderating role of environmental knowledge in the same study did not receive support, which the authors attribute to the strong pro-environmental psychological climate formed by effective GHRM potentially overwhelming the marginal moderating effect of environmental knowledge (Hameed et al., 2023). The pre-existing cultural inertia of the organization thus emerges as a key boundary affecting the implementation of GHRM.

5.4 Institutional and contextual level: regulation, industry, and national context

The institutional and contextual factors external to the organization delimit the macro-level boundary of GHRM efficacy. The stringency of environmental regulation, the attributes of the industry, and the national context all alter the strength of the pathway through which GHRM reaches environmental performance. In manufacturing contexts, stakeholder pressures transmit to environmental performance through GHRM, with their strength varying according to external institutional pressure (Guerci et al., 2016a). Related evidence further shows that institutional pressures can shape green innovation and sustainable performance through moderated-mediation pathways (Zhang et al., 2024), and that absorptive capacity conditions the influence of institutional pressure on green innovation (Qi et al., 2021). Meta-analytic evidence further indicates that the transmission of green innovation to economic performance depends heavily on enabling conditions such as regulatory incentives, green finance, and supply chains, and that in resource-constrained or institutionally weak contexts the returns tend to be delayed or uncertain (Bindeeba et al., 2025a); complementary meta-analytic evidence links GHRM to economic performance through green supply-chain management and environmental performance (Carballo-Penela et al., 2023), and green supply-chain practices themselves are associated with improved sustainability performance (Yildiz Cankaya and Sezen, 2019; Acquah et al., 2021). Institutional and contextual factors thus constitute the source of variation in GHRM efficacy across economies and industries.

5.5 Synthesis: when does GHRM efficacy strengthen or weaken

Surveying the boundary conditions across the four levels, a tentative pattern emerges that, given the limited evidence base, is best read as a hypothesis for future testing rather than an established regularity: individual-level moderation appears comparatively unstable and may be suppressed by dominant factors at the organizational level. In two studies, two different individual-level moderating variables, namely green values and environmental knowledge, failed to receive empirical support (Li et al., 2023; Hameed et al., 2023); Hameed et al. (2023) attribute the null effect to the strong pro-environmental psychological climate cultivated by effective GHRM potentially overwhelming the marginal effect of individual differences, and a similar interpretation may extend to the green-values result, though this rests on only two studies and warrants replication. By contrast, leadership support and institutional context exhibit more robust moderating effects, and, treated here as contextual rather than focal evidence, the economic returns of green innovation depend on external enabling conditions (Bindeeba et al., 2025a). This picture indicates that the efficacy of GHRM is not amplified linearly under all conditions but exhibits pronounced heterogeneity across levels and contexts: where the organizational climate is sufficiently strong, individual-level boundary effects tend to recede, and where external institutional support is absent, environmental and economic returns may be constrained even where the mechanisms are complete. The direction of effect and empirical status of the boundary conditions at each level are summarized in Table 5.

Table 5. Boundary conditions by level: direction of effect and empirical status.

6 An integrative framework and future research agenda

The constructs, mechanisms, behavioral pivot, and boundary conditions examined in the preceding sections, though differing in emphasis, jointly point toward an integrable analytical picture. Incorporating these elements into a unified framework helps to clarify the complete logic through which GHRM reaches environmental performance and lays the foundation for identifying research gaps and articulating a future agenda.

6.1 An integrative framework

The integrative framework unfolds as a conceptual pathway: in a behavioral route, GHRM inputs are associated with employee pro-environmental behavior through multiple mediating mechanisms and, in turn, with corporate environmental performance, while a parallel organizational route links GHRM through environmental knowledge and green innovation to environmental performance more directly (Figure 2). The chain begins with the bundle of GHRM practices organized along the three AMO dimensions, encompassing green recruitment, training, performance appraisal, compensation, and employee involvement (Tang et al., 2018). In the behavioral route, these practices are associated with environmental outcomes through the bundle of mechanisms described in the preceding section, as green psychological climate establishes shared perception and green self-efficacy and commitment internalize it into behavioral drive; in a parallel organizational route, green organizational culture and environmental knowledge support green innovation, which is associated with environmental improvement without necessarily operating through employee behavior (Dumont et al., 2017; Roscoe et al., 2019; Bindeeba et al., 2025a). In the behavioral route, the proximal element is employee pro-environmental behavior, an important point at which management investment is associated with environmental outcomes, with task-related and proactive behavior receiving distinct antecedent pathways (Robertson and Barling, 2013; Boiral, 2009). The terminus of the chain is corporate environmental performance treated as a distinct construct, measured through objective indicators such as emissions reduction, energy consumption, resource recycling, and pollution control (Kim et al., 2019).

Boundary conditions at four levels attach to specific links rather than to the framework as a whole: individual and leadership conditions primarily moderate the behavioral segment running from GHRM through the mediators to pro-environmental behavior, whereas organizational and institutional conditions primarily moderate the links from the mediators, green innovation, and pro-environmental behavior to environmental performance. Individual green values and self-efficacy, the green transformational style and support of leaders, the pre-existing cultural readiness and resistance to change of the organization, and environmental regulation and contextual factors at the institutional level jointly determine the strength of GHRM efficacy under different conditions (Farrukh et al., 2022; Nejati et al., 2017). It merits emphasis that this moderating structure exhibits pronounced heterogeneity: where the organizational climate is sufficiently strong, individual-level boundary effects tend to recede, and where external institutional support is absent, environmental and economic returns may be constrained even where the mechanisms are complete (Li et al., 2023; Hameed et al., 2023). The integrative framework thus fuses inputs, mechanisms, behavior, outcomes, and four levels of moderation into a single whole and provides a testable overall schema for future research.

Two constructs, green self-efficacy and environmental knowledge, appear in this review both as mediators (Sections 3.2 and 3.4) and as boundary conditions (Sections 5.1 and 5.3). These roles reflect alternative empirical specifications adopted in different primary studies rather than simultaneous positions within a single causal model; each construct is shown in its principal mediating role in Figure 2, with its moderating role discussed in the text. Green self-efficacy in particular is one component of the broader pro-environmental psychological capital construct examined by Saeed et al. (2019), which tested that composite as a mediator and environmental knowledge as a moderator, so evidence bearing specifically on green self-efficacy as a moderator is limited. In Figure 2, solid links denote relationships supported by meta-analytic or multiple primary studies, the dashed link denotes a proposition awaiting direct testing, and individual-level moderation is flagged as resting on limited evidence, so the figure distinguishes established pathways from those that remain tentative.

6.2 Research gaps and future agenda

While delineating what is known, the integrative framework also exposes several gaps that warrant attention. Inconsistency at the level of measurement constitutes a foremost obstacle, as the dimensional partitioning of GHRM varies across studies from two dimensions to three and to the three AMO bundles, and the scales for employee green behavior and environmental performance lack unified standards, constraining the comparability and accumulation of evidence (Pham et al., 2020; Ren et al., 2018). Related to this, the operationalization of environmental performance urgently requires treatment as a distinct construct rather than as a bundled measure, as meta-analytic evidence shows that combining heterogeneous sustainability dimensions into a composite index dilutes domain-specific effect signals and allows the true effect of green innovation on environmental performance to be obscured by economic and social dimensions (Bindeeba et al., 2025a). Future research should replace or supplement the widely used perceptual scales with objective environmental indicators, such as measured emissions reductions, energy consumption, and resource efficiency, in order to enhance the validity of the results.

The imbalance in the structure of evidence likewise warrants attention. Existing empirical work is heavily concentrated in cross-sectional samples from single industries in a small number of emerging economies, and the distribution of evidence between developed and emerging economies and across industries is uneven, limiting the generalizability of the conclusions (Amrutha and Geetha, 2020; Paulet et al., 2021; Yusliza et al., 2017). The scarcity of longitudinal and cross-level designs renders the dynamic evolution and causal direction among GHRM, mechanisms, behavior, and performance difficult to establish. Moreover, the paradoxical mechanism between green motivation and employee well-being, whereby excessive environmental requirements may induce green fatigue and burnout and thereby erode voluntary environmental investment, still lacks systematic empirical examination (Guerci et al., 2016b; Efranto et al., 2026). The research gaps and their corresponding future agenda are summarized in Table 6.

Table 6. Research gaps and a corresponding future research agenda.

6.3 Implications for environmental practice and policy

The value of the integrative framework should ultimately return to the practical concerns of environmental governance and emissions reduction rather than remaining at the level of operational recommendations for the human resource function. For firms, the framework indicates that improvement in environmental performance depends on embedding environmental goals within the human and behavioral systems of the organization, so that emissions reduction and resource efficiency become shared goals of everyday employee behavior and are translated through green innovation into substantive environmental improvement at the level of process and product (Singh et al., 2020; Aftab et al., 2023). For policymakers, the framework highlights the role of institutional context in shaping GHRM efficacy, as the stringency of environmental regulation and the availability of green finance and incentives directly affect the capacity of organizations to translate human investment into environmental performance, with economic returns treated as contextual, so that targeted regulatory design and policy support can amplify the governance effect of environmental effort within firms (Bindeeba et al., 2025a). Shifting the analytical perspective from how to optimize HR practice to how to improve environmental outcomes through the human pathway of the organization is precisely the central implication of this framework for environmental governance.

Several limitations of this review should be acknowledged. The synthesis is narrative rather than systematic: studies were selected to illustrate themes rather than through exhaustive screening, so the cited literature is representative rather than complete. The reliance on Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar, together with a focus on English-language and largely peer-reviewed sources, may introduce database-coverage and publication biases; and the concentration of primary evidence in cross-sectional, single-industry samples from a small number of economies further limits the generalizability of the patterns described. The framework advanced here is therefore best read as an organizing scheme and a set of propositions for future empirical testing rather than as an established causal account.

7 Conclusion

This narrative review has traced how green human resource management (GHRM) reaches corporate environmental performance through employee pro-environmental behavior. Treating environmental performance as a distinct outcome, rather than folding it into green corporate social responsibility or composite sustainable performance, keeps the focus on what actually improves environmental results and avoids diluting domain-specific effects. GHRM is associated with these outcomes largely through an interwoven set of mediators: green psychological climate establishes shared perception, green self-efficacy and commitment internalize it, green organizational culture consolidates it, and environmental knowledge and green innovation link it to measurable improvement. Employee pro-environmental behavior is an important proximal pathway through which these mechanisms are associated with environmental gains, its task-related and proactive forms drawing on distinct antecedents; a parallel organizational route through green innovation can also contribute without necessarily operating through employee behavior.

GHRM efficacy is not amplified uniformly but appears to vary across the individual, leadership, organizational, and institutional levels. In the few available tests, the moderators of green values and environmental knowledge received limited empirical support, possibly because a strong pro-environmental climate attenuates the marginal effect of such differences; the evidence base rests on only a handful of studies and no formal quality appraisal was conducted, so any conclusion that one level of boundary conditions moderates more robustly than another remains tentative. The integrative framework proposed here unites GHRM inputs, mediators, the behavioral pivot, environmental performance, and four levels of moderation into a single testable schema, and points toward standardized measurement, objective environmental indicators, longitudinal and cross-level designs, and the underexplored tension between green motivation and employee well-being. As environmental pressures mount, embedding the human pathway of the organization within environmental governance may prove essential to corporate emissions reduction and sustainable transformation.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Faisal Ejaz, University of Malaya, Malaysia

Reviewed by: Maryam Khokhar, Yanshan University, China

Jorge Alberto Esponda Pérez, University of Science and Arts of Chiapas, Mexico

Mónica Araceli Reyes Rodríguez, University of Guadalajara, Mexico