Mapping the landscape of employee flourishing: A systematic review and bibliometric analysis for sustainable HR practices

The accelerating shift toward human-centric and sustainable workplaces has amplified the need to understand how employees truly flourish within organisational systems. Despite the richness of flourishing in positive psychology, the organisational context has not sufficiently applied it. This research seeks to map the intellectual landscape of employee flourishing by systematically examining the evolution of flourishing, flourishing at work, and employee flourishing literature, thereby identifying existing gaps and proposing directions for advancing sustainable HR practices. A systematic review was conducted using the PRISMA framework, including peer-reviewed articles from the Scopus database between 2000 and 2024. The final dataset comprised 683 articles on general flourishing, 60 on workplace flourishing, and 35 on employee flourishing. Bibliometric analysis was performed using VOSviewer to visualise intellectual structures, influential contributions, and emerging research clusters. The results reveal that while flourishing research has expanded considerably in recent years, studies specifically addressing employee flourishing remain limited, both conceptually and empirically. The analysis also indicates an uneven geographical and disciplinary distribution, with minimal representation from developing countries and business management domains. The findings of bibliometric analysis and qualitative synthesis highlight the need for the development of theoretical frameworks that link employee flourishing with sustainable HRM practices. By recommending a more human-centred and sustainability-oriented approach to managing human resources, this systematic literature review informs future research and extends the contribution to the scholarship on sustainable organisation.