Green employee empowerment: a systematic literature review on state-of-art in green human resource management

Being a member of the society, it is evident that the organization has to operate like a team player; cue the influx of the green management concept. The study focuses on the second aspect of the green human resources management definition, which is preservation of knowledge asset and specifically addresses the novel concept of “Green employee empowerment” as a mediator. The research paper focuses on integrating and systematically arranging literature regarding motivating employees to pursue green tasks, as mediated by green employee empowerment. Literature supports that employees must be encouraged, empowered, and eco-conscious in order to take responsibility of green management tasks, which is core dilemma in today’s world. Green empowered employees is a novel concept as introduced by this research paper but also has strong literature support stemming from the concept of “employee empowerment”. The unit of analysis was previous available research studies relevant to the topic (their findings are included). Both the service and manufacturing sectors was focused and data was collected from ISI web of knowledge. Additionally, the search mostly focused on updated knowledge and only focused on 104 of recent and relevant studies. The study concluded that empowered employees are more motivated to perform environmental tasks which pay to be green. Human resources are truly the back bone of any successful organization, so motivated green workforce has a deep influential effect on social organizational profitability and productivity. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016