The Impact of Sustainable Human Resource Management Practices on Employees’ Organizational Citizenship Behavior: A Cross-Cultural Study

The contemporary workplace is undergoing a strategic shift from traditional human resource management (HRM), which often prioritizes short-term efficiency, toward Sustainable HRM (Sust HRM), a long-term, employee-centered approach focused on preserving and developing human capital. Although scholarly interest in Sust-HRM has expanded, empirical evidence remains fragmented, leaving limited insights into which HR practices meaningfully activate employee citizenship behaviors and how cultural contexts shape these effects. This study addresses these gaps by examining how Sust-HRM practices influence Organizational Citizenship Behavior towards the organization (OCB-O) through a cross-cultural comparison of employees in the U.S. and India. This study, analyzing data from 337 private-sector employees, highlights a vital distinction between bivariate correlations and multivariate effects. While all Sust-HRM practices positively correlated with OCB-O in bivariate models, only fairness, empowerment, stability, and safety remained significant in the fully specified regression. In contrast, diversity, training, work-life balance, and compensation lacked independent predictive power, failing to function as active behavioral drivers. Additionally, the collectivistic context (India) reported higher levels of OCB-O than the individualistic culture (U.S.). This study advances Sust-HRM scholarship by distinguishing between HR practices that directly drive organizational citizenship behavior (relational practices) and those that establish organizational legitimacy (baseline practices). Theoretically, it integrates three facets: strategic perspectives (resource-based view, stakeholder and shareholder theories), behavioral mechanisms (social exchange theory), and cultural context (Hofstede’s framework) to explain how HR systems translate into employee citizenship behavior. Building on this foundation, the study makes four original contributions to theory and construct development within the Sust-HRM–OCB domain. First, it advances theory by proposing an integrated, three-lens framework that synthesizes strategic, behavioral, and contextual perspectives to explain how Sust-HRM practices translate into employee outcomes. Second, it develops a structured Sust-HRM framework that differentiates baseline and relational practices and clarifies their behavioral effects, with national culture as a contextual boundary condition. Third, it introduces an empirically (EFA) validated, multi-construct measurement scale for Sust-HRM, addressing the absence of a standardized instrument in prior research. Finally, it advances an integrative definition of Sust-HRM as a multidimensional, culturally embedded system that drives employee citizenship behavior and offers actionable guidance for organizations.