SUSTAINABILITY gained importance for companies due to government laws and regulations. Organizations also started to acknowledge their contributions to society and the environment.

The shift led to strategic human resource management's evolution to sustainable human resource management (SuHRM). While the former focuses on ensuring financial outcomes, the latter highlights the need to secure the triple bottom line targets of people, planet and profit. SuHRM practitioners recognized the positive and negative effects of HRM activities, which prompted cultures that explicitly valued sustainability.