Sustainable Development has been necessitated by the progressive degradation resulting from human exploitation of nature. This sustainable development paradigm has opened up a new chapter in management and its quality as shown in; but it also necessitates the finding of new avenues of competitive advantage for meeting corporate economic goals and to cover the widely accepted interest in environmental and social arena. The concept of sustainable development is in vogue since the last decade and a half at the macroeconomic and r microeconomic level. However, the interconnections between human resources and sustainable development in organizations have been felt recently. It is also widely accepted that the human factor causes environmental effectiveness of organizations to improve. The management of Ecosystems or Eco-management is a product of human responsibility towards the environment, ecology and its environmental implications.
Hence, Green Human Resource Management (GHRM) has resulted in the development of Green practices that are environmentally friendly within many organizations. Green Human Resource Management (GHRM) has contributed to Sustainable Human Resource Management. GHRM aims towards creating efficiency by following environmental and social aspects in HR processes and resulting in increased value for company stakeholders. The Green HR policies apply practically towards sustainable development and contribute to a sustainable development by intensifying its implementation. Hence, Green HRM is the cornerstone of an environmentally oriented business. Green HRM is however relatively unknown and continues to be defined and refined as the time passes. Moreover, there exist a few studies and literature exists on this emerging concept and topic.
Environmental practices reduce operating costs and result in new development opportunities leading to better fiscal results and improvement in the relative competitive performance. Similarly, the annals of Environmental corporate responsibility dictate an increased business opportunities and improved stakeholder interaction. ECSR delivers products and processes with added features that add value to stakeholders’ perception about the organizations. ECSR contributes to a justified usage of natural resource and an overall reduction in the environmental impact emanating from human intervention. ECSR wins local investor interest and results in community acceptance that culminates in increasing access to funding. Investors cooperate with ESCR companies based on their financial performance, fiscal and environmental transparency, honest corporate image and an environmentally responsible governance structure. Such companies have better non-fiscal effects aimed at employee satisfaction and retention including better working conditions, increase in security, higher morale and motivation within the employees and an overall gregariousness towards environmentally-friendly activities.
Entrepreneurship discovers and ponders upon every opportunity for wealth creation, and improving the usage of resources. According to Bygrave (2004), this process involves the activities and functions that accrue from opportunities and exploit these opportunities by the creation of relative organizations. Entrepreneurship is therefore based upon the opportunity and making the best use of it. Hence, entrepreneurship action based in its core, and requires closely related actions of creativity, strategy, and organization. The cornerstone of Entrepreneurship is to act innovatively proactively and bear the burden of all risks concealed therein. Pro-activeness, innovation and industry is also exhibited by established organizations as well. Hence, we define sustainable entrepreneurship that is responsible towards ecology as the eventual process resulting in entrepreneurial opportunities through careful attention to the details of the natural environment and the impact of the venture, thereby creating wealth and benefits for humans.
Entrepreneurship has resulted in an increase in growth in economy and increased the opportunities for investment, but some failures of the institution of entrepreneurship are contributed by gross negligence to environmental implications. However, researchers assert that entrepreneurs need to work actively to balance economic at par with being environmentally responsible with a great stress on sustainability. Justifiable sustainability, innovation and economy is essential towards sustainable development. The new concept of sustainable economic growth is far reaching and has more connotations as compared to the ancient theory of economic growth based on exploitation alone.
Sustainable entrepreneurship is essentially a new chapter being opened and it has opened a new debate in history. The close association of entrepreneurship, sustainable development and environmental impacts have been examined by various viewpoints in literature. In this regard, Melay and Kraus (2012) distinctively combine Eco with entrepreneurship to formulate the word “ecopreneurship”, and combining Environment with Entrepreneurship to coin the word enviropreneurship by, green entrepreneurship and Green HRM, and sustainable entrepreneurship.
There exist two schools of thought in the existing literature the first one is oriented towards environmentally friendly practices and the second school of thought is sustainability friendly. The first school of thought examines the the attitudes of entrepreneurs and their methods of attaining the goals therein through vibrant usage of environmentally related governance policies, and ecologically oriented products as well as services, and the management of environmentally sustainable business.
The second school of thought belongs to environmentally-oriented entrepreneurs and how they manage their businesses. Such companies reap financial gains by a gross reduction of the carbon footprint and by decreasing environmental problems and reducing the overall ecological disaster that we are facing today.
The first school of thought of sustainability-oriented literature delves in the notion of sustainable development and its far reaching implications on entrepreneurial leadership, this school deliberates on the achievements of entrepreneurs and their sustainability. Sustainable entrepreneurs work towards the solution of environmental and societal problems through their industry and work. Sustainable entrepreneurs mostly focus on social, environmental and economic issues as a whole.
Further work in this avenue opens up the need for attempting to examine existing literature with a clear focus on the both schools of thought. It is open to examine sustainable entrepreneurship that is also ecologically responsible to apply proactive strategies towards ecological sustainability and are rightly guided by the vision of their management.
Such ecologically sustainable entrepreneurship is open for debate for h future research and several topics exist for pondering in our contemporary research as well. This research considers ecologically sustainable entrepreneurship for a better overview and criticism of existing literature, and the future research plans are also discussed. Moreover, antecedents as well as implications of these actions have been presented for the benefit of researchers and enterprises for their business activities.
This study aims at presenting the concept of ecologically sustainable entrepreneurship thereby assessing the impact of organizations practicing environmental concerns in human resource practices and a clear focus on sustainable development. This research is aimed to clarify the hypothesis that Green HRM positively impacts sustainable development in organizations. This study is based on a literature inquiry examined by a thorough questionnaire survey.