Green operational performance in a high-tech industry: Role of green HRM and green knowledge

Prior studies on green HRM often treat it as a stand-alone practice, or a subset of organizational environmental management (EM) system. In this article, consistent with the calls to merge EM systems and TQM, we maintain that green HRM should be operated as a subset of broad TQM system, as a component of TQM-oriented HRM. We identified seven green HRM practices that can be further classified into three sub-systems: competency-enhancing, motivation-enhancing, and opportunity-enhancing. Analyzing data collected from 339 Chinese high-tech companies, we found that the motivation-enhancing and competency-enhancing sub-systems of green HRM affect all four green knowledge-creation and diffusion processes, but the opportunity-enhancing sub-system of green HRM affects only green combination and internalization. We also found that green design is affected by all four knowledge processes, green purchasing is affected by all the green knowledge processes except for green internalization, and green production process is affected only by green externalization and green combination. Our study contributes to business research by taking a first step toward integrating green HRM into the broader TQM framework and investigating its performance implication from a TQM perspective.