Leading Green at Every Level: A Scoping Review of GHRM Enablers Across Management Levels and Outcomes

Green Human Resource Management (GHRM) describes the integration of sustainable management practices into HRM with the aim of reducing organizations’ environmental impact while strengthening competitiveness under global ecological constraints. Over the past decade, research has particularly emphasized the role of CEO-level managers in shaping employee green behavior, culture, and sustainable outcomes. However, this focus neglects managers at other levels who exert influence on different organizational processes and members, and who therefore also need to be considered for advancing organizational sustainability. A systematic overview that reflect such a comprehensive perspective, goes beyond the CEO level, and identifies enablers across all levels of management is still lacking. Specifically, little is known about which actions these enablers at other management levels take to advance GHRM, which organizational and individual outcomes they target, and which quantifications are used to assess their effectiveness. To address this gap, we conduct a scoping review to obtain a more nuanced understanding of the existing landscape regarding this blind spot in GHRM research. We focus on the following research questions: 1) Which management-level enablers can be identified in the pursuit of GHRM? 2) Which measures are implemented by the identified enablers? 3) Which outcomes are targeted by these measures? and 4) How do they evaluate the effectiveness of the measures? By systematizing the enablers, their actions, outcomes, and evaluation methods, this review will provide an integrative framework for understanding management contributions to GHRM across all levels. In doing so, it contributes to the special issue Green Human Resource Management: HR Strategies for a Sustainable Future by providing a comprehensive overview of the role of different management levels in supporting environmental sustainability and in developing environmental competencies within organizations.