A Study on Organizational Readiness to Adopt Green HRM: A Case Study based on University of Kelaniya

Abstract

The increasing trend of adopting sustainable development practices in the corporate world have resulted in internalization of green principles into different organizational practices. Adoption of Green HRM is one such trend that is gaining increased attention as that pave the way for an organization to reach its goals via green principles and help inculcate a green culture within community as a whole. Green HRM reflects on how driving the human force of an organization is aimed at achieving organizational goals in all the activities of HRM for recruitment up to the termination of an employment. Studies show that awareness of green practices among the stakeholders of an organization is vital in internalization of green concepts to organizational processes. However, there is no empirical evidence to assess whether adoption of green principles into an organization have been successfully inculcated to the mind-set of the organizational community and whether organization is ready to adopt green principles to HRM practices. University of Kelaniya was selected as the study site as it has remained as the first green university in Sri Lanka according to UI greenmetrics ranking for 4 consecutive years as a result of adopting green practices.Hence the study is carried out to meet two objectives. Firstly, to assess the awareness and perceived value among the university community on the adoption of green practices in the university. Secondly, to identify the organizational readiness to adopt Green HRM in the university. Primary and secondary data were gathered regarding the current practices and policies of sustainable development adopted in University of Kelaniya. It is expected to adopt a mixed method using qualitative and quantitative research techniques. It is expected to use qualitative research methods to meet the first objective which require in depth analysis towards awareness and perceptions of university community towards green practices. In order to meet the second objective quantitative research methods are expected to be applied as identification of organizational readiness would require a statistical validation which would help identify where we are. University staff is the target population as practices of HRM are best experienced by staff as compared to other segments of university community and since the staff consists of several categories, stratified random sampling is expected to be used as the sampling method. The research work is ongoing and is currently at the stage of collecting qualitative data to meet the first objective and several interviews have been conducted.