The International Journal of Human Resource Management

Future-Proofing Organizations Through Common Good Human Resource Management (CGHRM): Opportunities and Challenges

This special issue is part of a dual Special Issue Call for Papers on Common Good HRM in the International Journal of Human Resource Management. The other special issue, entitled Common-Good Human Resource Management: Global and Comparative Perspectives, is available here: (Common-Good Human Resource Management: Global and Comparative Perspectives). Both parts of the special issue will be housed in a shared Collection in the journal.

Future-Proofing Organizations Through Common Good Human Resource Management (CGHRM): Opportunities and Challenges  

Background

Organizations now operate amid intersecting crises, including climate volatility, technological discontinuities, demographic shifts, and intensified stakeholder scrutiny, requiring HRM to build adaptive capacity and move beyond a narrow focus on headcount optimization. Common-good human resource management (CGHRM) constitutes a conceptual framework that aligns people systems with societal value creation while sustaining organizational viability (Aust, Matthews, & Muller-Camen, 2020; Cooke & Wood, 2024). Hence, CGHRM advances “true business sustainability” (Dyllick & Muff, 2016) through HR architectures that institutionalize dignity, reciprocity, and purpose in everyday practices (Frémeaux & Michelson, 2017; Hollensbe et al., 2014). Empirically, emerging studies link CGHRM and related sustainable HRM practices to resilience and ethical conduct at employee and unit levels (Lu, Zhang, Yang, & Wang, 2023; Pham, Jabbour, Pereira, Usman, Ali, & Vo‐Thanh, 2023). Yet adoption faces material barriers: entrenched profit-first logics, capability and cost constraints, and the absence of robust metrics for social and ecological outcomes beyond traditional performance indicators (Elkington, 1997; Stahl et al., 2020). Framing CGHRM as a future-proofing capability foregrounds three priorities: (1) governance arrangements that embed accountability for common-good targets; (2) context-sensitive HR designs that complement strategy and operations; and (3) evaluation systems that trace causal pathways from HR interventions to SDG-relevant outcomes (Aust et al., 2020). These priorities underscore the potential of CGHRM to institutionalize long-term adaptability and ethical legitimacy, enabling organizations to withstand uncertainty while advancing collective sustainability.

Theoretical contributions of the special issue

Although CGHRM has gained traction as a response to global sustainability imperatives, its theoretical contours remain underdeveloped and contested (Aust et al., 2024; Dyllick & Muff, 2016). Our special issue aims to advance the debate by articulating three distinct contributions. First, it aims to re-anchor HRM in the common good paradigm by challenging the utility-maximizing assumptions embedded in the AMO framework and the Resource-Based View, while extending earlier sustainability-oriented approaches such as Triple Bottom Line HRM (Elkington, 1997), Green HRM (Haddock-Millar et al., 2016) and Socially Responsible HRM (Barrena-Martínez et al., 2019). Within this framing, it seeks to establish a clearer typology of ethically driven HRM systems that move beyond firm-centric logics toward a more comprehensive sustainability paradigm (Dyllick & Muff, 2016). Second, it aims to bridge moral philosophy and micro-HR processes by theorising how values of dignity, solidarity and reciprocity (Hollensbe et al., 2014) materialise in practices such as inclusive recruitment, participatory governance and stewardship-oriented rewards. Specifically, it seeks to model how such values influence employees’ sensemaking, discretionary behaviour and creative problem solving, thus extending insights from recent empirical studies on sustainable HRM in the literature (Lu et al., 2023). Third, it aims to conceptualise CGHRM as a future-proofing capability by examining how organisations reconcile tensions between short-term performance pressures and long-term societal commitments, and how evaluation systems can trace pathways from HR interventions to resilience and legitimacy outcomes (Aust et al., 2024; Stahl et al., 2020). This theorisation highlights the opportunities and challenges inherent in employing CGHRM to reinforce organisational adaptability while safeguarding ethical legitimacy in an era of uncertainty and transformation. Collectively, a refined conceptual agenda will provide scholars with a critical lens to examine how organisations reconcile economic imperatives with societal well-being as a pathway for future-proofing.

Objectives of the special issue

Our special issue aims to advance the theorization and practice of CGHRM through four interrelated objectives. First, it seeks to sharpen the conceptual contours of CGHRM, clarifying how it both builds on and extends beyond prior sustainability-oriented HRM approaches. Second, it calls for rigorous inquiries into how CGHRM practices foster organisational resilience, employee well-being, and stakeholder trust while enabling a balanced pursuit of financial and societal performance. Third, it aims to conceptualise CGHRM as a future-proofing capability through addressing the opportunities and challenges of embedding common-good principles in the face of technological, environmental, and socio-political disruptions. Fourth, it seeks to accelerate methodological and evaluative innovation by encouraging the development of novel analytical tools, robust performance metrics, and theoretically grounded roadmaps to guide the future trajectories of CGHRM research and practice. Presented below are sample questions, intended as illustrative rather than definitive, that this special issue seeks to address:

• What new theoretical perspectives or integrative frameworks can be developed to position CGHRM as a driver of organisational resilience, social responsibility, and long-term sustainability?
• What metrics and evaluative frameworks are most effective in capturing the ecological, social, and ethical outcomes of CGHRM beyond conventional performance indicators?
• How do CGHRM systems influence stakeholder engagement and reshape corporate governance structures, particularly through accountability mechanisms and inclusive leadership practices?
• In what ways do CGHRM practices foster ethical cultures by embedding transparency, reciprocity, and respect for diversity into organisational routines and decision-making processes?
• How do CGHRM practices shape team-level dynamics such as trust, cohesion, and collaborative problem-solving, and what factors strengthen or weaken these effects?
• How do organisations balance the opportunities and challenges of integrating CGHRM principles into strategic HR designs under conditions of technological disruption, environmental uncertainty, or socio-political change?
• How do employees across different demographic groups interpret fairness and justice within CGHRM systems, and how do these perceptions influence their commitment, discretionary effort, and career development?
• How do individual employees experience tensions between performance expectations and common-good commitments, and what coping mechanisms or adaptive behaviours emerge from these experiences?