Review maps rapid growth in green human resource management research

A systematic and bibliometric review of 350 scholarly articles found rapid growth and extensive international collaboration in green human resource management, while research attention appears to be shifting toward digital transformation, self-efficacy and green innovation. The study examined articles published from 2017 through 2025 and reported a 42.84% scholarly growth rate and 42.57% international collaboration across the analyzed literature.

The researchers retrieved the publications from the Scopus database and analyzed them with VOSviewer. The methods comprised co-occurrence analysis, bibliometric coupling, longitudinal co-word analysis and co-citation analysis. Based on the review, these approaches were used to identify recurring concepts, relationships among publications and changes in research themes. The mapping uncovered six major clusters: sustainable employee behavior, organizational environmental culture, pro-environmental behavior and leadership, environmental performance, social factors associated with GHRM effectiveness, and GHRM ethics, values and corporate social responsibility.

The review highlights green recruitment, employee green training, green performance appraisal, and pay and reward systems as practices associated with nurturing pro-environmental employee behavior, embedding sustainability in organizational culture and improving environmental performance. Its authors present these practices within an integrated conceptual model intended to connect human-resource strategy with environmental goals. However, the bibliometric review itself does not report an intervention or establish that any single practice causes a measurable environmental outcome; it synthesizes findings from the published studies included in its dataset.

Sustainability, based in Switzerland, and the Journal of Cleaner Production emerged as leading journals in the field. The international-collaboration figure measures the share recorded within the reviewed corpus, rather than demonstrating that collaboration produces better studies or more effective workplace practices. Likewise, the reported growth rate and thematic shifts describe patterns in the publication record rather than changes in organizations’ environmental performance. The analysis was limited to one bibliographic database and the 2017–2025 publication window, so its map does not capture all research produced elsewhere or outside that period. The findings provide a systematic overview of a growing literature and identify the practices, themes and publication networks most prominent within the reviewed corpus, but they do not quantify real-world emissions reductions or establish universal implementation standards.

Subject of Research: Bibliometric analysis of green human resource management research published from 2017 to 2025.

Article Title: A systematic and bibliometric review of green human resource management

Article References: Aziz, Y., Zada, N., & Hani, I. B. (2026). A systematic and bibliometric review of green human resource management. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04699-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04699-0

Keywords: green human resource management, systematic review, bibliometric analysis, VOSviewer, pro-environmental behavior, organizational culture, environmental performance, digital transformation, green innovation, international collaboration, systematic, bibliometric