Enhancing employee’s outcomes through adopting the change leadership role of human resource professionals in sustainable enterprises

Abstract

Achieving sustainability requires institutional change, where Human resource professionals play an important role in leading organizational changes toward sustainability. In this change leadership role, they strive to embed sustainability values in organizations through leveraging resources to change organizational norms, rules, routines, and values. Therefore, the content and method of doing their change leadership role could affect to employee outcomes differently, in turn to organizational sustainability. Grounded in the perceived organizational support of social exchange theory (Eisenberger et al., 1986) and the demands-resources theory (Bakker et al., 2003; Demerouti et al., 2001), the study explores the relationships between the degree of adopting HR change leadership role and employee outcomes of organizational commitment and work engagement in sustainable enterprises by employing the mix method of qualitative and quantitative researches. Qualitative methods (in-depth interviews with 05 experts) are used to adjust the scales, while quantitative methods are used to test scales, research hypotheses, and models. The study utilized a sample of 1,058 employees from 24 sustainable enterprises in Vietnam and employed exploratory factor analysis, partial least squares structural equation modeling method for analysis. The findings reveal that organizational commitment and work engagement are significantly and positively affected by the degree of adopting HR change leadership role. This suggests that sustainable enterprises can foster a more committed and engaged workforce, leading to potentially better overall sustainable performance and workplace satisfaction by actively adopting HR change leadership roles.