Towards a configuration of socially responsible human resource management policies and practices: findings from an academic consensus

Abstract

The integration of socially responsible behaviour has become a strategic priority for companies in recent years. Academic contributions that merge the fields of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and human resource management (HRM) have been expanding, demonstrating a broad sweep of benefits reflected in greater levels of commitment, motivation, and performance by employees. However, little has been clarified about what academics and business management understand to be a configuration of socially responsible human resource management (SR-HRM) practices. This paper aims to define and provide an initial academic approximation of a set of socially responsible human resource practices. In order to accomplish this objective, a content analysis was conducted based on a review of the literature, CSR reports, and international CSR standards such as the Global Reporting Initiative and ISO 26000. The theoretical findings were supported by a panel of experts who inspected them over three rounds of reviews. The sample for the study was created by consulting the academic literature, strengthened by the input from the panel of experts. The results show an academic consensus of 80%, and support the existence of a valid configuration of 8 socially responsible human resource policies divided into 32 practices.

Keywords:

• Human resource management
• corporate social responsibility
• socially responsible human resource management
• socially responsible HRM system
• panel of experts

Notes

1. IBEX 35 is the official index of the Spanish Continuous Market. The index is comprised of the 35 most liquid stocks traded on the Continuous market. It is calculated, supervised, and published by the Society of Stock Exchanges.

2. The Labour Practices section is developed in the Manual of GRI3 and can be found on page 31. Source: https://www.globalreporting.org/resourcelibrary/G3-Guidelines-Incl-Technical-Protocol.pdf.

3. The updated version of GRI3, GRI 3.1 includes an additional policy in the labour and decent work section that complements the previous policies. This information can be retrieved from: https://www.globalreporting.org/resourcelibrary/G3.1-Comparison-Sheet.pdf.

4. The structure of core areas and, more specifically, the core subject labour practices, can be retrieved from page 7 of: http://www.iso.org/iso/discovering_iso_26000.pdf.

5. By prevention we mean both accident prevention and promotion of health and physical wellbeing.