Employee involvement: The heart of Sustainable Human Resource Management

This paper shows that two leading approaches to Sustainable HRM, Green HRM and Common Good HRM, share an emphasis on employee involvement and that this provides a point of fusion from which to develop a practical approach to Sustainable HRM centred on a transformed form of high-involvement management. Despite their shared concern with sustainability, the two approaches constitute distinct frameworks. Green HRM focuses on improving the physical environment through HRM practices, whereas Common Good HRM encompasses both physical and human sustainability. Both approaches are normative, but they differ in their conceptions of organisational purpose, stakeholder responsibilities, and the moral orientation of HRM. Nevertheless, each approach emphasises employee involvement, although its role differs between them: it is functionally instrumental in Green HRM and intrinsic to Common Good HRM. Green HRM primarily promotes individual-level involvement, whereas Common Good HRM extends this to collective mechanisms and forms of industrial democracy. I show how this shared emphasis can be developed into a practical model of Sustainable HRM. Pursuing such a model implies a transformed form of high-involvement management embedded throughout the organisation. In particular, the wider use of cross-functional and cross-hierarchical working parties could provide a form of industrial democracy akin to deliberative democratic practices. Under this approach, employee involvement fulfils a moral imperative while also serving as a mode of collective governance, a generator of knowledge, and a catalyst for innovation. Employee involvement should therefore stand at the centre of Sustainable HRM, with responsibility for its development extending well beyond the HR function.