LEVEL OF ADAPTATION OF GREEN HU lAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES IN THE APPAREL INDUSTRY IN SRI LANKA.

Abstract

It is evident that contemporary corporate practices consist of environment friendly approaches instead of purely be 'money focused'. It is plausible to find in the literature the importance of adapting environmental management practices as a key objective of organizational operations, backed by corporate human resource management practices. Thus, a critical debate, today is how sustainability is achieved by practicing green management concepts through the effective management of workforce. As a result, contemporary human resource management has taken initiative to cater to organizations' green practices under green human resource management. Therefore, this study is dedicated to identify the extent to which the human resource management processes have aligned with green management practices as green human resource management practices in the Apparel Industry in Sri Lanka. The sample was selected based on simple random sampling method and population refers to the apparel industry in Sri Lanka. For the selected sample of thirteen companies in the apparel industry in Sri Lanka, well-structured questionnaire was distributed and the results gathered from the responses were analyzed usmg descriptive statistics technique for testing the achievement of objectives and frequencies and percentages for data presentation. Data were collected using both primary and secondary sources. Primary data were collected through questionnaires and secondary data was collected from the previous studies, websites, books, articles and other related publications. Twelve objectives were set to test Elevenhuman resource management practices to achieve the research purpose. The findings revealed that only job design and analysis showed a high level of adaptation of green management concept while all the other human resource management practices showed moderate and low level of adaptation of green management concepts. Thus, the study bridged a gap in the literature in revealing the extent of adapting green human resource management practices in the apparel industry in Sri Lanka, while recommending to the apparel companies to adapt green HRM at least in the major HR processes like recruitment and selection, training and development, performance management, reward management and health and safety management in order to improve their environmental performance in a more sustainable manner.