IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/resene/v66y2021ics0928765521000464.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Green human resource management – A personnel economics perspective

Author

Listed:
  • Sinclair-Desgagné, Bernard

Abstract

The Stern-Stiglitz Report on carbon pricing emphasizes that environmental policy must not only cope with market failures, but also with government and organizational failures. Focusing on the latter, this paper investigates how some practices central to human resource management – employee selection and training, performance appraisal and rewards, employee discretion and empowerment – can be jointly deployed to direct managerial attention adequately. Using a static multi-task principal-agent model and standard monotone comparative statics tools, I derive predictions/prescriptions on how these practices should adjust as the firm's stakes in sustainability increase. These prescriptions notably include some qualifications concerning the outsourcing of environmental services and employee training, and some implications for public policy.

Suggested Citation

  • Sinclair-Desgagné, Bernard, 2021. "Green human resource management – A personnel economics perspective," Resource and Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:resene:v:66:y:2021:i:c:s0928765521000464
    DOI: 10.1016/j.reseneeco.2021.101261
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0928765521000464
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.reseneeco.2021.101261?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Joseph E. Stiglitz, 1991. "Symposium on Organizations and Economics," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 5(2), pages 15-24, Spring.
    2. Segerson, Kathleen & Tietenberg, Tom, 1992. "The structure of penalties in environmental enforcement: An economic analysis," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 23(2), pages 179-200, September.
    3. Edward P. Lazear & Kathryn L. Shaw, 2007. "Personnel Economics: The Economist's View of Human Resources," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 21(4), pages 91-114, Fall.
    4. Wouter Dessein & Andrea Galeotti & Tano Santos, 2016. "Rational Inattention and Organizational Focus," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 106(6), pages 1522-1536, June.
    5. John K.-H Quah, 2007. "The Comparative Statics of Constrained Optimization Problems," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 75(2), pages 401-431, March.
    6. William Ocasio, 2011. "Attention to Attention," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 22(5), pages 1286-1296, October.
    7. Shoeb Ahmad, 2015. "Green Human Resource Management: Policies and practices," Cogent Business & Management, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 2(1), pages 1030817-103, December.
    8. Sah, Raaj Kumar & Stiglitz, Joseph E, 1988. "Committees, Hierarchies and Polyarchies," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 98(391), pages 451-470, June.
    9. Milgrom, Paul & Shannon, Chris, 1994. "Monotone Comparative Statics," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 62(1), pages 157-180, January.
    10. Bernard Sinclair-Desgagné & Sandrine Spaeter, 2016. "Incentive Contracts and Downside Risk Sharing," Working Papers of BETA 2016-22, Bureau d'Economie Théorique et Appliquée, UDS, Strasbourg.
    11. Holmstrom, Bengt & Milgrom, Paul, 1994. "The Firm as an Incentive System," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 84(4), pages 972-991, September.
    12. Glenn MacDonald & Leslie M. Marx, 2001. "Adverse Specialization," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 109(4), pages 864-899, August.
    13. Bernard Sinclair-Desgagn� & Sandrine Spaeter, 2018. "Incentive Contracts and Downside Risk Sharing," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 34(1), pages 79-107.
    14. Stiglitz, Joseph E., 2019. "Addressing climate change through price and non-price interventions," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 119(C), pages 594-612.
    15. Henk Folmer & H. L. Gabel (ed.), 2000. "Principles of Environmental and Resource Economics," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 1605.
    16. Rabah Amir, 2005. "Supermodularity and Complementarity in Economics: An Elementary Survey," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 71(3), pages 636-660, January.
    17. Sinclair-Desgagne, Bernard & Gabel, H. Landis, 1997. "Environmental Auditing in Management Systems and Public Policy," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 33(3), pages 331-346, July.
    18. Holmstrom, Bengt & Milgrom, Paul, 1991. "Multitask Principal-Agent Analyses: Incentive Contracts, Asset Ownership, and Job Design," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 7(0), pages 24-52, Special I.
    19. Rosen, Sherwin, 1983. "Specialization and Human Capital," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 1(1), pages 43-49, January.
    20. William Ocasio, 1997. "Towards An Attention‐Based View Of The Firm," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 18(S1), pages 187-206, July.
    21. DeCanio, Stephen J, 1998. "The efficiency paradox: bureaucratic and organizational barriers to profitable energy-saving investments," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 26(5), pages 441-454, April.
    22. Edward P. Lazear, 2018. "Compensation and Incentives in the Workplace," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 32(3), pages 195-214, Summer.
    23. Pascal Paillé & Yang Chen & Olivier Boiral & Jiafei Jin, 2014. "The Impact of Human Resource Management on Environmental Performance: An Employee-Level Study," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 121(3), pages 451-466, May.
    24. Donald M. Topkis, 1978. "Minimizing a Submodular Function on a Lattice," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 26(2), pages 305-321, April.
    25. H. Landis Gabel & Bernard Sinclair‐Désgagné, 1994. "From market failure to organisational failure," Business Strategy and the Environment, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 3(2), pages 50-58.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Rangpeng Liu & Zhuo Yue & Ali Ijaz & Abdalwali Lutfi & Jie Mao, 2023. "Sustainable Business Performance: Examining the Role of Green HRM Practices, Green Innovation and Responsible Leadership through the Lens of Pro-Environmental Behavior," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(9), pages 1-20, April.
    2. Ruth Oluyemi Bamidele & Ali Ozturen & Mine Haktanir & Oluwatobi A. Ogunmokun, 2023. "Realizing Green Airport Performance through Green Management Intransigence, Airport Reputation, Biospheric Value, and Eco-Design," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(3), pages 1-26, January.
    3. Fatimah Mahdy & Mohammad Alqahtani & Faiz Binzafrah, 2023. "Imperatives, Benefits, and Initiatives of Green Human Resource Management (GHRM): A Systematic Literature Review," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(6), pages 1-31, March.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Theodor Vladasel & Simon C. Parker & Randolph Sloof & Mirjam van Praag, 2024. "Revenue drift, incentives, and effort allocation in social enterprises," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 33(3), pages 630-651, August.
    2. Bernard Sinclair-Desgagné, 2000. "Environmental Risk Management and the Business Firm," CIRANO Working Papers 2000s-23, CIRANO.
    3. Manthei, Kathrin & Sliwka, Dirk & Vogelsang, Timo, 2021. "Information Provision, Incentives, and Attention: A Field Experiment on Facilitating and Influencing Managers' Decisions," IZA Discussion Papers 14199, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    4. Mohnen, Pierre & Roller, Lars-Hendrik, 2005. "Complementarities in innovation policy," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 49(6), pages 1431-1450, August.
    5. Lindbeck, A & Snower, D-J, 1996. "Centralized Bargaining, Multi-Tasking, and Work Incentives," Papers 620, Stockholm - International Economic Studies.
    6. Finn Christensen, 2019. "Comparative statics and heterogeneity," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 67(3), pages 665-702, April.
    7. Robert Gibbons & John Roberts, 2012. "The Handbook of Organizational Economics," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 9889.
    8. repec:eee:labchp:v:3:y:1999:i:pb:p:2373-2437 is not listed on IDEAS
    9. Asunur Cezar & Huseyin Cavusoglu & Srinivasan Raghunathan, 2014. "Outsourcing Information Security: Contracting Issues and Security Implications," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 60(3), pages 638-657, March.
    10. Roy, Sunanda & Sabarwal, Tarun, 2010. "Monotone comparative statics for games with strategic substitutes," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 46(5), pages 793-806, September.
    11. Brice Corgnet & Brian Gunia & Roberto Hernán González, 2021. "Harnessing the power of social incentives to curb shirking in teams," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 30(1), pages 139-167, February.
    12. Kukushkin, Nikolai S., 2018. "Better response dynamics and Nash equilibrium in discontinuous games," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 74(C), pages 68-78.
    13. Tohyun Kim & Daegyu Yang, 2020. "Multiple Goals, Attention Allocation, and the Intention-Achievement Gap in Energy Efficiency Innovation," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(17), pages 1-13, August.
    14. Roy, Sunanda & Sabarwal, Tarun, 2012. "Characterizing stability properties in games with strategic substitutes," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 75(1), pages 337-353.
    15. Koch, Caleb M., 2019. "Index-wise comparative statics," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 102(C), pages 35-41.
    16. Chambers, Christopher P. & Echenique, Federico, 2009. "Supermodularity and preferences," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 144(3), pages 1004-1014, May.
    17. Heinrich, Ralph P., 1999. "A Model of Corporate Governance As a System," Kiel Working Papers 931, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel).
    18. Ilya Segal & Michael D.Whinston, 2012. "Property Rights [The Handbook of Organizational Economics]," Introductory Chapters,, Princeton University Press.
    19. Jia, Hao, 2020. "The even split rule for (concave) symmetric supermodular functions," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 186(C).
    20. Bar Light, 2019. "Stochastic Comparative Statics in Markov Decision Processes," Papers 1904.05481, arXiv.org, revised Jan 2020.
    21. Drewianka, Scott, 2006. "A generalized model of commitment," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 52(3), pages 233-251, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Environmental management; Ability-Motivation-Opportunity (AMO) approach; Multi-task principal-agent analysis; Economics of attention;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • Q50 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - General
    • L20 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - General
    • M50 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Personnel Economics - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:resene:v:66:y:2021:i:c:s0928765521000464. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/505569 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.