Human Resource Management for ESG: A Structured Literature Review and Research Agenda

Purpose: Environmental, social and governance (ESG) commitments are made in boardrooms but carried out by employees. This review asks what the literature knows about how human resource management (HRM) contributes to each ESG pillar, through which mechanisms, under what conditions, and how HRM itself is captured in ESG disclosure.

Design/methodology/approach: Guided by the assembling, arranging and assessing stages of the SPAR-4-SLR protocol, we combined keyword searches of Scopus and Web of Science (articles published from 2011 onward) with backward and forward citation chaining and selected a purposive set of 29 core empirical studies, which were coded on HRM stream, ESG pillar, level of analysis, design and context, and 17 prior reviews were used to position the contribution.

Findings: The evidence base is lopsided. Over half of the coded studies address the environmental pillar through green HRM, mostly with cross-sectional employee surveys from Asian service and manufacturing firms. The social pillar is studied mainly through socially responsible HRM and employee well-being, while governance appears only in work on ESG-linked executive pay and board diversity. Three streams that rarely cite one another, namely micro-level HRM research, corporate finance studies of employee welfare and accounting research on disclosure, are integrated here into a framework linking HRM architecture, mechanisms, pillar-specific outcomes, disclosure and firm value, with a feedback loop from ESG performance to HR investment.

Originality/value: To our knowledge, the review is the first to organise HRM-ESG research by pillar rather than by HR practice and to connect it with the new generation of human capital reporting rules (ESRS S1, ISO 30414:2025, the SEC human capital rule and Vietnam’s Circular 96/2020/TT-BTC). A research agenda of six themes, each with questions, theories and designs, is proposed, with particular attention to emerging economies.