5Cs for 5Ps: Achieving sustainable development goals through transforming human resource management

The United Nations has adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) covering five areas: People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace, and Partnership (the 5Ps). Businesses were extensively involved in the development of the SDGs and are regarded as important partners in realizing them. With many of the SDGs directly related to how human capital in organizations is managed, human resource management (HRM) practices are particularly important for achieving these goals. Thus, many HRM theories and practices are focused on sustainability in general and achieving the SDGs in particular. Yet, recent reports show that humanity is very far from achieving most of the 17 SDGs. This paper employs an abductive method to analyze this anomaly and propose a holistic SDG-driven HRM theory for achieving the 5Ps. It proposes 5Cs including the underlying culture (contradictory-accepting), practices (competency-based), policies (comprehensive by inducing occupational justice), programs (e.g. co-innovation program), and structure (collaborative, dynamic team-based) for an HRM system that is more likely to attain the SDGs. While previous scholarship focused on why sustainability should be incorporated into HRM practices and what it should aim to achieve, this novel theory (a) analyses the SDGs to reveal their underlying organizational goals, (b) analyses the literature to match these underlying goals with best practice HRM bundles, and (c) explains how these may be implemented. The proposed theory is timely as there is a pressing need to find ways to attain the SDGs.