Environmental unlearning in response to perceived environmental force: How green human resource management and environmental climate matter?

Environmental unlearning refers to a firm’s change or abandonment of outdated environmental knowledge, values and routines to better adapt to evolving environmental and sustainability challenges. Despite increasing interest in environmental unlearning, how perceived environmental force affects it remains unclear. Based on stakeholder theory, we explore the mediating role of green human resource management (i.e., green recruitment and selection, green training and development, green performance management) between perceived environmental force and environmental unlearning and the moderating role of environmental climate. We collected two-wave survey data from 317 Chinese manufacturing firms and tested the hypotheses using ordinary least squares regressions and bootstrapped mediation analysis with the PROCESS macro. Our findings reveal that green training and development and green performance management partially mediate the influence of perceived business force on environmental unlearning, while green recruitment and selection and green performance management fully mediate the influence of perceived social force on environmental unlearning. Further, environmental climate alleviates the impacts of perceived business force on green recruitment and selection as well as green performance management, while strengthening the impacts of perceived social force on green training and development as well as green performance management. By distinguishing perceived business force from social force, this study contributes to stakeholder theory by adding more nuances to how different types of perceived environmental force are translated into environmental unlearning through different green human resource management practices and by identifying environmental climate as a boundary condition shaping these processes.