Perceived Green Human Resource Management Practices and Corporate Sustainability: Multigroup Analysis and Major Industries Perspectives

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

 Perceived Green Human Resource Management Practices and Corporate Sustainability: Multigroup Analysis and Major Industries Perspectives

This paper investigates the impact of GHRM practices on corporate sustainability practises from the point of view of the HR practitioners in Pakistan.  The topic is interesting, and the paper is well written. Paper seems to follow sufficient methodology rigour. However, I have the following concerns:

Literature linking GHRM practices and corporate sustainability is absent from the literature review. I believe there should be some studies looking at such relationships. Even if nothing has been published in the Pakistani context, those studies should be reviewed to establish a clear research gap wherever such relationship or industries perspectives have been published.

How does stakeholder theory fit in to address the current research problem in different industries of Pakistan, such as industrial/manufacturing, IT, banking, and education? The findings or discussion or implications have not been linked to the theoretical framework, i.e. the stakeholder theory. This makes the use of stakeholder theory relatively superficial.  

I am struggling to understand why Pakistan is a proper context to conduct this research. The reader needs to know the general corporate sustainability and adoption of green human practises in general in Pakistan to establish the suitability of context.

I believe the claim about a methodological contribution is overstated because almost scale items have been used from the existing scales. Just adding two scales items does not seems to be a significant methodological contribution.

There need to be details about the ethical clearance of the project. How the respondents were selected, how they were approached? The response rate of 80% seems quite unusual in a developing country context. Are there some existing publications supporting such high response rates? There is no information on when the data was collected.

Is there a particular reason behind the selection of these four sectors? How vital are these four sectors for the Pakistani economy? Is there some previous understanding of why these sectors were initially expected to differ in adopting GHRM practices?

The implication section reiterates the contributions and the lack of existing literature in the field or suggests how the findings can be useful for businesses, managerial practices, policy making etc. The authors need to rethink the contribution, implications and scope for future research based on the findings of the present study. This is one of the significant weaknesses of the paper. It is not precisely clear what education as a sector implies? Does it mean the universities or colleges? It's not clear. It would be interesting to know what kind of institutions were included in the education sector.

Author Response

Point 1: Literature linking GHRM practices and corporate sustainability is absent from the literature review. I believe there should be some studies looking at such relationships. Even if nothing has been published in the Pakistani context, those studies should be reviewed to establish a clear research gap wherever such relationship or industries perspectives have been published.

Response 1: Now previous studies included in the literature review section highlight in red color.

Point 2: How does stakeholder theory fit in to address the current research problem in different industries of Pakistan, such as industrial/manufacturing, IT, banking, and education? The findings or discussion or implications have not been linked to the theoretical framework, i.e. the stakeholder theory. This makes the use of stakeholder theory relatively superficial.  

Response 2: Discussion on the stakeholder theory covering different industries including industrial/manufacturing, IT, banking, and education are not reflected in the theoretical framework and discussion section.

Point 3: I am struggling to understand why Pakistan is a proper context to conduct this research. The reader needs to know the general corporate sustainability and adoption of green human practises in general in Pakistan to establish the suitability of context.

Response 3: Supporting arguments regarding the link are now added in the introduction section of the study. “Finally, the study offers practical implications for the different industries of the country as the Security Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP) issued a code of corporate governance 2019 mentioning the implementation of green and sustainable workplace practices in these industries”.

Point 4: I believe the claim about a methodological contribution is overstated because almost scale items have been used from the existing scales. Just adding two scales items does not seems to be a significant methodological contribution.

Response 4: The authors of the scale highlight recommended conducting a study in different industries by applying the newly developed scales, hence, the study claims one of the methodological contributions of the study.

Point 5: There need to be details about the ethical clearance of the project. How the respondents were selected, how they were approached? The response rate of 80% seems quite unusual in a developing country context. Are there some existing publications supporting such high response rates? There is no information on when the data was collected.

Response 5: The statements regarding ethical clearance, respondents approach, response rate, and data collection period are included. “After the due consent, the questionnaires were distributed using a self-administered approach. The self-administered data collection approach carries the advantage of a high response rate of up to 90% [60]. Hence, of the distributed questionnaires, respondents returned the filled questionnaire with a response rate of 80% and hence acceptable [60]. However, seven incomplete questionnaires were excluded. A total of 200 samples were submitted for final data analysis. Data were collected between September 2019 and January 2020”.

Point 6: Is there a particular reason behind the selection of these four sectors? How vital are these four sectors for the Pakistani economy? Is there some previous understanding of why these sectors were initially expected to differ in adopting GHRM practices?

Response 6: Industries selection is now elaborated in the method section. “However, due to the potential of missing values, non-response rate, and outliers we distributed 250 questionnaires among the HR professional working in different industrial sectors of Pakistan such as manufacturing, banking, education, and information technology (IT). These industries are the main contributors to Pakistan's economy.

Point 7: The implication section reiterates the contributions and the lack of existing literature in the field or suggests how the findings can be useful for businesses, managerial practices, policy making etc. The authors need to rethink the contribution, implications and scope for future research based on the findings of the present study. This is one of the significant weaknesses of the paper. It is not precisely clear what education as a sector implies? Does it mean the universities or colleges? It's not clear. It would be interesting to know what kind of institutions were included in the education sector.

Response 7: Now implications are discussed accordingly.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Row 367 - Would be interesting to characterize more precisely the statistical population: industrial / manufacturing, IT, banking, and education. Which branches of industry were they part of?

Row 376 is about table 1, not 2.

Row 393 refers to table 2.

In the chapter Data Analysis and Results do not write about H4 explicitly, only in the table. There should be a sentence about it, similar to those for the other hypotheses, as in lines 428-446.

Author Response

Point 1: Row 367 - Would be interesting to characterize more precisely the statistical population: industrial / manufacturing, IT, banking, and education. Which branches of industry were they part of?

Response 1: Already mentioned

Point 2: Row 376 is about table 1, not 2.

Response 2: Now corrected accordingly.

Point 3: Row 393 refers to table 2.

Response 3: Now corrected accordingly.

Point 4: In the chapter Data Analysis and Results do not write about H4 explicitly, only in the table. There should be a sentence about it, similar to those for the other hypotheses, as in lines 428-446.

Response 4: Now discussed. “However, in contrast, the relationship between green training and corporate sustainability is not supported as the p-value is >0.05. The results of the hypothesis are in contrast with the previous findings [6,48,50,52]”.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors, 

It was a pleasure to read your manuscript. In my opinion, the relevance of the topic is extremely high. 

I suggest  considering several aspects: 

1. Introduction,. Please, explain why do you anticipate differences in your industries, namely manufacturing, IT, banking and education. Why theses particular industries?
2. Corporate sustainability. It is complication to understand what do you mean by corporate sustainability. Please, try to provide clear definition  and clear characteristics of CS. 
3. Instrument. Please, remove  definitions of Tang et al. (2018) and put them in theoretical background. 
4. Discussion and conclusions. Please, expand your discussion part. 

Author Response

1. Introduction,. Please, explain why do you anticipate differences in your industries, namely manufacturing, IT, banking and education. Why theses particular industries?

Response: Details are added in the introduction, LR, methodology section, and Discussion sections.  

2. Corporate sustainability. It is complication to understand what do you mean by corporate sustainability. Please, try to provide clear definition  and clear characteristics of CS. 

Response: Definition provided on pages 144-147. 

3. Instrument. Please, remove  definitions of Tang et al. (2018) and put them in theoretical background. 

Response: Removed. 

Discussion and conclusions. Please, expand your discussion part. 

Response: Expanded accordingly. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

Overall comment

This study aims to assess the industries' perspective, regarding the impact of GHRM practices (i.e., green recruitment & selection, green pay & rewards, and green employee involvement and green training) on its corporate sustainability’s practices.

To pursue this purpose, it was collected data from  human resource professionals from industrial sectors of Pakistan.

The authors have made use of SEM-PLS to test the study hypotheses and multigroup analysis (MGA) among the different industrial sectors considered here.

Besides the identification of some impact with GHRM practices on corporate sustainability of some companies, they have also found different impacts values of GHRM regarding the sectors involved, by using multi-group analysis (MGA). This study allows to perceive the contextualization of social, environmental and economic implications to the society in general, interested in green initiatives. This work comes to fill an important gap on literature, regarding this issue.

This study is an additional (and good) contribution to a research field that “asks for more”, in order to confirm the importance of having GHRM practices to promote corporate sustainability in organizations.

Additionally, the same study allows to understand which measures could better rather than others, in order to promote sustainability within organizations.

In general, the authors have answered the research questions stated here.

Some recommendations regarding this issue, can be found below.

  Strong points:

• The relevance of the subject
• Research method: It could be improved, by providing (for example) a better description of the GHRM’s scales used here.
• Discussion of results: Although it could be improved by discussing the obtained results with the ones from a more updated literature.

Weak points:

• Data used: Given the purpose of this study, a broader data involving other HR professionals from other countries, could enrich the work developed here, by obtaining a more diversity of the sample used here, avoiding therefore the (eventual) problem of “bias” regarding the industry  perception within GHRMP on corporate sustainability.
• Literature review: some of the literature used here are old, which support the need of update, in order to reinforce the importance of this study, namely the obtained results

Some (minor) recommendations of improvement:

• Line 376: (..)”Table 2 reports the details of the participants of the survey. Among 200 participants, 376 78.57% represented males while 21.43% accounted for females.” (..) -àThe authors would want to say… “Table 1” (instead of Table 2)?

• Use the same references style on the entire manuscript to be more coherent. Some reference’s style is different (preferably, use the one, adopted by the journal’s  guidelines). An example of this incoherence can be found on section 4  between the sentence (line 387)(..)“(Hair, Hult, Ringle, Sarstedt, & Thiele, 2017)” (..) and the sentence (lines 391-392) (..)”and multigroup analysis (significantly differs between groups) were 391 performed [55,56].”(..).

• Line 393: (..)”Table 1 summarizes the results of convergent validity and internal consistency reliability. “(..)…correct to “Table 2”

• Line 458: “Table 6” should be mentioned before the correspondent table takes place

• The section 5 “Discussion and Conclusion” could be split and isolated from the issue of “discussion results”, in order to have a dedicated and final section, just related to the issue “conclusions and future work”

Author Response

• Data used: Given the purpose of this study, a broader data involving other HR professionals from other countries, could enrich the work developed here, by obtaining a more diversity of the sample used here, avoiding therefore the (eventual) problem of “bias” regarding the industry  perception within GHRMP on corporate sustainability.
• Response: At the moment it would be difficult to add data from the other country as the data was already collected. So better to be included in future research projects. 
• Literature review: some of the literature used here are old, which support the need of update, in order to reinforce the importance of this study, namely the obtained results
• Response: now updated 
• Line 376: (..)”Table 2 reports the details of the participants of the survey. Among 200 participants, 376 78.57% represented males while 21.43% accounted for females.” (..) -àThe authors would want to say… “Table 1” (instead of Table 2)?
• Response: Corrected accordingly. 
• Line 393: (..)”Table 1 summarizes the results of convergent validity and internal consistency reliability. “(..)…correct to “Table 2”
• Response: Corrected accordingly. 
• Line 458: “Table 6” should be mentioned before the correspondent table takes place
• Response: Corrected accordingly. 
• The section 5 “Discussion and Conclusion” could be split and isolated from the issue of “discussion results”, in order to have a dedicated and final section, just related to the issue “conclusions and future work”
• Response: The authors followed the standard format of the journal. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have addressed my comments in this resubmission except for ethics approval from the relevant institution. They have stated about 'due consent' of the respondents, but nothing about the approval process adhered to or not. I congratulate the authors for the improvements made in the paper 

Author Response

The authors have addressed my comments in this resubmission except for ethics approval from the relevant institution. They have stated about 'due consent' of the respondents, but nothing about the approval process adhered to or not. I congratulate the authors for the improvements made in the paper.

Author Response: Updated accordingly.