Green Human Resource Management Practices and Organisational Sustainability Performance

Background to the Study

Manufacturing occupies an awkward position in the sustainability conversation. It is the productive backbone of industrialising economies, generating jobs, driving innovation, and earning export revenue — yet it is also disproportionately responsible for resource depletion, greenhouse gas emissions, industrial effluents, and occupational health hazards. In Nigeria, where manufacturing contributes a meaningful share of GDP and employs millions across formal and informal supply chains, this tension between industrial growth and ecological responsibility is especially acute, and it sits squarely within the remit of Nigeria's National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency (NESREA), the federal body charged with enforcing environmental compliance across industry.

There is growing recognition among management scholars and corporate leaders that sustainability cannot be achieved through technology and capital investment alone. The behaviours, knowledge, values, and decisions of the people inside an organisation matter just as much — an insight that has driven the rapid growth of Green Human Resource Management as a field of both research and practice. Green HRM can be broadly understood as the integration of environmental management objectives into core HRM functions — recruitment, training, performance management, compensation, and employee relations — with the aim of mobilising a workforce toward sustainability goals. Unlike traditional environmental management, which tends to focus on technological upgrades or regulatory compliance, Green HRM targets the attitudes, capabilities, and motivations of individual employees, embedding environmental stewardship from the point of hire through the full employment lifecycle.

Two Green HRM practices have drawn particular attention: green recruitment and green training. Green recruitment means attracting, selecting, and onboarding candidates who already carry environmental awareness and the competencies needed to support a firm's sustainability agenda, placing environmental criteria alongside traditional requirements at the entry point of employment. Green training covers deliberate efforts to build employees' environmental knowledge, skills, and attitudes through structured learning — from environmental induction and waste-reduction workshops to more advanced training in life-cycle assessment, carbon accounting, and circular economy principles.

The theoretical case for a link between these practices and sustainability performance rests on a few pillars. Resource-Based View theory holds that human capital, when it is rare, valuable, and difficult to imitate, becomes a source of sustained competitive advantage — and a workforce deliberately recruited for and trained in sustainability competencies fits that description. Ability-Motivation-Opportunity theory adds that sustainability outcomes improve when employees have the ability, motivation, and opportunity to act in environmentally responsible ways, and Green HRM practices speak to all three. Most of the empirical evidence supporting this link comes from Asia, Europe, and North America, and largely from service-sector organisations or large multinationals in institutional environments considerably more mature than Nigeria's — leaving manufacturing in sub-Saharan Africa, and Nigeria specifically, a significant gap in the literature despite the sector's environmental footprint and the regulatory pressure now coming from NESREA and international trade partners demanding supply-chain sustainability compliance.

Statement of the Problem

Despite the accelerating global conversation on sustainable manufacturing and the documented environmental toll of Nigeria's industrial sector — air pollution from cement and steel plants, water contamination from chemical and food processing facilities, and solid waste from consumer goods manufacturing — the adoption of Green HRM practices among Nigerian manufacturers remains fragmented and largely uncoordinated. Several problems underlie this. Many firms still treat environmental management as a compliance function, a matter of meeting minimum regulatory standards, rather than as a strategic priority embedded in core HR and operational systems, which means environmental criteria in recruitment are rarely formalised and sustainability training tends to be episodic rather than systematic.

While a growing body of international research shows that Green HRM practices improve sustainability performance, almost no rigorous empirical work has examined this relationship specifically within Nigerian manufacturing — and simply transplanting findings from Chinese, Indian, or Western manufacturing contexts is problematic given real differences in institutional frameworks, enforcement regimes, workforce characteristics, and the maturity of environmental management systems. Even studies that do look at Green HRM in developing-country manufacturing often treat sustainability performance as a single, undifferentiated outcome, when in reality it has environmental, social, and economic dimensions that may respond quite differently to distinct Green HRM interventions. This study addresses these gaps by empirically examining how green recruitment and green training affect each dimension of sustainability performance among manufacturing firms in Lagos State, generating disaggregated, context-sensitive evidence with direct practical value.

Aim and Objectives

The broad objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between Green HRM practices and organisational sustainability performance in manufacturing firms in Lagos State, Nigeria. Specifically, the study aims to:

1. Assess the extent of adoption of green recruitment practices among manufacturing firms in Lagos State.

2. Evaluate the level of implementation of green training practices in the study firms.

3. Examine the effect of green recruitment on environmental sustainability performance.

4. Determine the relationship between green recruitment and social sustainability performance.

5. Investigate the effect of green training on environmental sustainability performance.

6. Assess the relationship between green training and economic sustainability performance.

Research Questions

The study was guided by the following research questions:

1. To what extent have manufacturing firms in Lagos State adopted green recruitment practices?

2. What is the level of implementation of green training practices in the study firms?

3. What effect does green recruitment have on environmental sustainability performance?

4. What is the relationship between green recruitment and social sustainability performance?

5. What effect does green training have on environmental sustainability performance?

6. What is the relationship between green training and economic sustainability performance?

Significance of the Study

This study adds value at several levels. Theoretically, it extends Resource-Based View theory and AMO theory into the Green HRM domain within an emerging-market manufacturing context, testing whether the positive Green HRM-sustainability relationship documented in developed and Asian economies holds in Nigeria's distinct institutional environment, and contributing to the growing body of Green HRM literature in sub-Saharan Africa.

For HR practitioners and sustainability managers in Nigerian manufacturing, the study offers empirical evidence on which specific Green HRM lever — recruitment criteria or training content — most effectively drives each dimension of sustainability performance, enabling more targeted allocation of human capital development resources. Firm leaders and boards get a business case for investing in Green HRM beyond mere regulatory compliance, backed by a demonstrated link between people-centred sustainability strategies and operational, social, and economic outcomes. Researchers or sustainability teams working through a similar study design may find it useful to talk through their methodology with our research coaching service. For policymakers — particularly NESREA, the Federal Ministry of Environment, and the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria — the study offers evidence that workforce-level interventions can meaningfully complement regulatory and technological tools in driving sectoral sustainability performance, with direct implications for environmental incentive schemes and sustainability reporting requirements. Readers exploring adjacent sustainability and reporting questions may also find our related project on ESG reporting quality and cost of capital in Nigeria a useful companion piece.

Scope of the Study

This study is geographically limited to manufacturing firms operating in Lagos State, Nigeria, which hosts the largest concentration of formal manufacturing activity in the country, particularly across the Apapa, Ikeja, Oregun, Ojota, and Ikorodu industrial corridors. It covers a cross-section of manufacturing subsectors including food and beverages, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and paints, packaging and plastics, building materials, and consumer goods. The temporal scope runs from 2020 to 2025, capturing the period during which sustainability pressures on Nigerian manufacturers intensified through NESREA enforcement actions, NGX ESG guidelines, and growing international supply-chain sustainability requirements. Primary data were collected from HR managers, sustainability and environmental managers, line managers, and senior production staff with direct knowledge of both HRM and sustainability practices in their organisations.

Operational Definition of Terms

Green Human Resource Management (Green HRM): The deliberate alignment of HRM policies, processes, and practices with an organisation's environmental management goals, encompassing all efforts to use the human resource function as a vehicle for advancing environmental sustainability within and beyond the firm.

Green Recruitment: The practice of incorporating environmental awareness, pro-environmental values, and sustainability-related competencies as explicit selection criteria in the hiring process, including green employer branding, green job descriptions, and environmentally oriented interview and assessment instruments.

Green Training: Structured programmes designed to develop employees' environmental knowledge, skills, and attitudes at all levels of the organisation, including induction training on environmental policies, job-specific environmental skills training, and broader sustainability literacy development.

Sustainability Performance: The degree to which an organisation achieves outcomes aligned with the three pillars of sustainable development — environmental, social, and economic — sometimes referred to as the Triple Bottom Line. Environmental performance covers reductions in pollution, waste, and resource consumption; social performance covers employee welfare, community relations, and occupational health and safety; and economic performance covers cost efficiency gains, long-run profitability, and sustainable revenue generation arising from sustainability practices.

Manufacturing Firms: Formal industrial establishments engaged in the physical or chemical transformation of materials into finished or semi-finished products, registered under the Companies and Allied Matters Act and operating within the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria's Lagos chapter coverage area.

Triple Bottom Line (TBL): A sustainability accounting framework, coined by Elkington in 1994, that expands the conventional financial bottom line to include environmental (Planet) and social (People) performance dimensions alongside economic (Profit) performance.

Conclusion

The findings make a fairly direct case: in Nigerian manufacturing, sustainability performance is not just a matter of better machinery or tighter regulatory compliance — it is substantially shaped by how firms hire and how they train. Green recruitment gives a head start, but green training does more of the heavy lifting, particularly for environmental and economic outcomes, which suggests that ongoing capability-building deserves at least as much investment as entry-point screening. Firms that treat Green HRM as a genuine strategic priority, rather than a compliance afterthought, stand to gain on multiple sustainability fronts at once. Students and researchers exploring related HR, sustainability, or manufacturing topics can browse comparable studies in our full project topics library, which spans business administration and related departments.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is Green Human Resource Management (Green HRM)?

Green HRM is the integration of environmental management objectives into core HR functions such as recruitment, training, performance management, and compensation, with the goal of mobilising a workforce toward an organisation's sustainability goals.

2. What is the difference between green recruitment and green training?

Green recruitment focuses on attracting and hiring candidates who already carry environmental awareness and relevant competencies, while green training focuses on building employees' environmental knowledge, skills, and attitudes after they join the organisation.

3. Which has a bigger impact on sustainability performance — recruitment or training?

This study found that green training exerted a stronger overall influence on sustainability performance than green recruitment, suggesting that continuous environmental capability development matters more than initial hiring filters alone.

4. How was this study conducted?

The study surveyed 220 respondents drawn through stratified random sampling from HR managers, sustainability officers, line managers, and senior production staff in Lagos-based manufacturing firms, yielding 198 usable responses analysed with descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, and OLS regression in SPSS version 27.

5. What are the three dimensions of sustainability performance measured in this study?

The study measured environmental performance (reductions in pollution, waste, and resource consumption), social performance (employee welfare, community relations, and occupational health and safety), and economic performance (cost efficiency, profitability, and sustainable revenue generation).

6. Why was Lagos State chosen for this study?

Lagos hosts the largest concentration of formal manufacturing firms in Nigeria, particularly across the Apapa, Ikeja, Oregun, Ojota, and Ikorodu industrial corridors, making it the most representative location for studying manufacturing sector dynamics.

7. What theories were used to interpret the findings?

The findings were interpreted through Resource-Based View theory, Ability-Motivation-Opportunity (AMO) theory, and Stakeholder theory, which together explain how environmentally skilled and motivated employees can become a source of sustained competitive advantage.

8. Does green recruitment affect social sustainability performance?

Yes. The study found that green recruitment practices had a significant positive effect on social sustainability performance, alongside their effect on environmental sustainability performance.

9. What does the study recommend for manufacturing firms?

It recommends that firms embed environmental criteria explicitly into recruitment frameworks, institutionalise structured green training programmes, and set sustainability key performance indicators tied to individual employee performance appraisals.

10. What role can regulators play in encouraging Green HRM adoption?

The study suggests that regulatory bodies can incentivise Green HRM adoption through compliance frameworks and tax relief provisions, complementing enforcement efforts already carried out by agencies such as NESREA.

PROJECT INFORMATION

PROJECT PRICE

NGN5,000

NUMBER OF PAGES

68

NUMBER OF CHAPTERS

1-5

ADDITIONAL CONTENT

ABSTRACT AND TABLE OF CONTENT ; GET THE FULL MATERIAL!