Sustainable HRM Roles and Competencies

In the past two decades strategic HR roles and the aligned strategic HR competencies focused on achieving financial outcomes to gain strategic importance in achieving business strategies. Currently there are growing socially responsible or prosocial organizational behaviour expectations by stakeholders, and it has become an important disruption for organizations. However, strategic HR roles and competencies provide very limited capabilities for HR professionals to facilitate organizations to cope with the disruption caused by stakeholders’ expectations. Hence, sustainable HR roles and competencies which provide broader roles and competencies for HR professionals than the strategic HR roles in the current stakeholder disruption to implement corporate sustainability strategy are discussed in this chapter. Three different sustainable HR roles are proposed which include the dedicated sustainable HR positional roles, identity construction for the integrated and fusion/synthesis sustainable HR roles. Different sets of competencies for each of the proposed sustainable HR roles are discussed to achieve sustainable HRM performance outcomes (i.e., improved organizational performances and prosocial organizational behaviour towards the key stakeholders). The proposed HR competencies for each of the roles are not rigid and static but it is dynamic, and it may have to be used in combination with other competencies to perform effectively the dedicated, integrated and fusion of sustainable HR roles for achieving sustainable HRM performance outcomes. Sustainable HR roles and competencies are discussed to facilitate HR professionals to enable organizations to achieve sustainable HRM performance outcomes for corporate sustainability as a competitive advantage.