Employees' Mitigation of Ambiguous Green Human Resource Management Signals

ABSTRACT Human resource management (HRM) is increasingly directed at leveraging businesses' environmental strategies. Current research shows how integrating environmental objectives into HRM practices can positively affect an organization's green performance. However, the literature on strategic HRM posits that, for HRM systems to reap the benefits of their communication, they must send unequivocal signals, which is challenging, given the various objectives HRM needs to integrate. With its focus on the process of how employees respond and make sense of green HRM (GHRM), this study complements the output‐oriented GHRM literature. We show how employees perceive GHRM signals to be ambiguous, but also how they, despite lack of managerial support, proactively mitigate the perceived ambiguities by giving meaning to their pro‐green behavior and proposing actionable steps for establishing clarity. Therefore, unclear HRM signals alone do not necessarily prevent employees from committing to the organization's green strategy.