Aligning Green Human Resource Practices and Adaptive Change Management: A Pathway to Sustainable Innovation Performance

Environmental sustainability has emerged as a strategic requirement of those organizations that want to remain competitive in the long run, but most companies continue to adopt green human resource management (GHRM) practices and organizational change initiatives individually, thus restraining their potential transformation. This paper constructs and confirms a combined approach of how the fit between GHRM practices and adaptive change management processes results in high performance in sustainable innovation. In this study, 83 organizations from both the manufacturing and service sectors were selected using a purposive sampling method, to ensure diversity across developed and developing countries and varying levels of GHRM integration (low, moderate, and high). The sample was chosen to represent a broad spectrum of sustainability maturity levels, allowing for a comprehensive analysis of how GHRM practices influence green product, process, and business model innovation. This selection, alongside 30 peer-reviewed studies published between 2020 and 2025, underpins the conceptual framework used to activate change preparedness and link GHRM dimensions with innovation outcomes. I demonstrate that organizations with a high GHRM–change management fit have much higher levels of innovation performance—both in terms of the number of green product innovations (485%) and more sustainable performance improvement (90.5 on average)—than low-integration organizations. Findings also reveal that leadership commitment, employee engagement, organizational learning, and systemic reinforcement are key mediating processes that enhance the effect of GHRM activities. Temporal trajectory analysis demonstrates that integrated organizations go through deployment, consolidation, and optimization phases, as well as increasing returns to performance, with an accelerating trend of 36 months. This paper is important in management research as it fills in gaps in the literature, providing an explanation of how human resource practices facilitate organizational change at the system level. In practice, this study offers evidence-based recommendations to managers who want to establish sustainability-oriented innovation capability by implementing a coordinated GHRM and adaptive change management approach.