From Strategic HRM to Sustainable HRM? Exploring a Common Good Approach Through a Critical Reflection on Existing Literature

The emergence of sustainability discourse has provided new avenues and momentum for human resource management (HRM) scholars to extend existing lines of enquiry and to generate new ones. This has led to a surge of research interest in sustainability in the last decade, not least as a response to the growing environmental concerns and, more recently, to the Sustainable Development Goals launched by the United Nations in 2015. The rapidly emerging body of research is accompanied by confusion and critiques regarding what sustainable HRM entails, how it can be measured, and who may benefit. This perspective paper discusses these issues by focusing on common good HRM as the latest variant of sustainable HRM and identifies challenges as well as opportunities for research. It draws on stakeholder theory, legitimacy theory, cultural perspective, and HR ecosystem theory to illustrate how future studies can advance our knowledge of common good HRM by building on the existing strong body of HRM scholarship and embracing a broader range of stakeholders, epistemological perspectives, and methodological approaches.