The Nexus Between Sustainable Human Resource Management and Sustainable Development Goals—Literature Review and Future Research Directions

Sustainable Human Resource Management (SHRM) has emerged as a strategic approach for enabling organisations to simultaneously achieve economic, social and environmental sustainability. Despite the growing body of SHRM research, limited attention has been devoted to systematically examining how SHRM contributes to the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This study addresses this gap by combining a bibliometric analysis with a systematic literature review to examine the evolution, intellectual structure and research themes of SHRM, while developing a transparent framework for mapping SHRM research to the SDGs. Following the PRISMA guidelines, 1129 articles published between 2015 and 2026 were retrieved from the Scopus and Web of Science databases and analysed using VOSviewer. The findings reveal a substantial increase in SHRM research since 2020 and identify six dominant clusters. Building on these themes, this study develops a coding framework that systematically links the identified clusters to multiple SDGs. The findings highlight the multidimensional role of SHRM in advancing the social, economic, environmental and institutional dimensions of the 2030 Agenda while identifying emerging future research areas. This study extends the existing SHRM literature by providing a comprehensive synthesis of the field, introducing a transparent SDG mapping framework and offering practical guidance for organisations seeking to align their human resource strategies with sustainable development objectives.