• Energy Research

This editorial of the special issue on ‘Export Product quality, Renewable Energy, and Sustainable Production’ presents the bibliometric analysis of the 44 studies published in Frontiers in Environmental Sciecne. This special issue addresses the theoretical and empirical concerns in this fundamental research area and identifies key areas in governance, labour, digitalisation and other aspects to help sustainable development, economic growth and lower carbon emissions.

Despite the plethora of explications of the direct and indirect impacts of green people management practices on different dimensions of individual and organizational performance and sustainability, a holistic model demonstrating the constituent aspects and impacts of such sustainability on organizational, individual, and team performance is missing. The objective of this study is to address this gap/void through a review of 127 papers on green human resource management (GHRM) following a systematic literature review approach. Based on the systematic review, this study used a thematic analysis, which identified twenty-four disparate people and organizational aspects and grouped the most used ones into five theoretical lenses, including AMO = ability–motivation–opportunity, RBV = resource-based view, SHT = stakeholder theory, SET =social exchange theory, and SIT = social identity theory. These five sets of results were used to develop the first-of-its-kind holistic framework showing how GHRM works in a cyclical process to fill the missing gap in how to sustainably improve individual, group, and organizational performance for multiple organizational stakeholders. Second, this article contributes theoretically to the social engagement and social identity theories, thereby extending Deci and Ryan’s organismic integration and self-determination theories to show how GHRM practices can be implemented for sustainable organizational performance. Third, this study also proposed a new and more sustainable bottom line for business organizations seeking to improve their performance, and this contribution is referred to as sustainable GHRM-organizational performance (SGHRM-OrgP). Finally, this study proposes a research agenda highlighting where more research areas are needed. Despite the potential that such a model offers for organizational sustainability, the authors recognize the next research step of applying its constituent parts in practically optimizing performance.