Linking Sustainable Human Resources Practices to Corporate Reputation: The Role of Job Satisfaction and Organizational Culture

Abstract

This study examines how three sustainable human resource practices (green reward, green training, and green recruitment)affect employee job satisfaction and corporate reputation, and how organizational culture moderates the satisfaction-reputation relationship in sustainability-oriented organizations. Drawing on social exchange theory and the resource-based view, a cross-sectional online survey was administered to 416 employees who had worked in organizations that had integrated environmental sustainability. Results show that green reward and green recruitment are positively associated with job satisfaction, where as green training is not. Only green recruitment has a significant direct association with corporate reputation, whereas green reward and green training do not. Job satisfaction strongly predicts corporate reputation and significantly mediates the relationships between all three human resource practices and reputation. Moreover, organisational culture positively moderates the association of job satisfaction with corporate reputation, strengthening this link in more sustainability-oriented cultures. The findings suggest that managers should prioritise green recruitment for direct reputational benefits, use green rewards and training to build job satisfaction as an indirect reputational lever, and cultivate a sustainability-supportive culture to amplify these relationships. This study is novel in jointly modelling green rewards, green training, and green recruitment with job satisfaction and corporate reputation while integrating social exchange theory and the resource-based view to test both mediating (job satisfaction) and moderating (organisational culture) mechanisms within a single empirical framework.