Green Leadership and Employee Green Behaviour: A PRISMA-Based Systematic Review of Green HR Practices, Organizational Climate, and Green Training

Abstract

 The pressure to reduce environmental impact has increased significantly among organisations around the world and the behaviour of individual employees has become the critical point of connection between corporate environmental strategy and actual environmental performance. This systematic review aims to synthesize the evidence on the relationship between green leadership and employee green behaviour, as well as the role of green human resource (HR) practices, organizational climate and green training in this relationship. A structured search of major databases was conducted and after the removal of duplicate records and screening according to pre-defined inclusion/exclusion criteria, 176 studies were included in the qualitative synthesis following PRISMA 2020 guidelines. The evidence is grouped into five constructs: green behaviour, green leadership, green HR practices, organizational climate, and green training, as well as the relationships between them. The results indicate that green leadership has a positive impact on green behaviour, and this impact is strong and consistent, both direct and indirect via two paths: a formal path (green HR practices) and an informal path (organizational climate). Considering the Ability-Motivation-Opportunity theory and the Theory of Planned Behaviour, green training is identified as a moderator that amplifies these effects, by providing the capacity to transform the motivational state into action. The synthesis reveals four gaps: (1) few studies have compared the two mediating pathways in the same model, (2) training is not used as a moderator, (3) there is a lack of evidence from large manufacturing firms in emerging economies, and (4) there are no integrated models that combine all four organizational factors. The review provides a unified, evidence-based framework and detailed synthesis tables to bring the vast and disparate literature together and make it accessible to researchers and practitioners. Practical implications and directions for future research are discussed.