The Role of Green HRM in Enhancing Work-Life Balance and Reducing Burnout in the Banking Sector
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With the increasing awareness of the impacts of workplace stress and environmental sustainability, the study aims to examine the role of Green Human Resource Management (GHRM) in improving work-life balance and employee burnout among the public sector banks that have high job demands, regulatory pressures and long working hours as some of the contributors to the problem. The study was conducted as a systematic review of peer-reviewed publications published between 2015 and 2025 on the topic of GHRM, work-life balance, and employee burnout in the scope of public sector banks - omitting publications older than 2015, non-open access articles, and those that considered only strategic HRM but not green aspects - to create a narrow corpus of studies. These were reviewed using frequency analysis to represent associations between practices of GHRM and outcomes, which were supplemented by thematic content analysis based on hybrid deductive-inductive coding based on Job Demands-Resources theory, which identified flexible working arrangements, digital documentation and paperless transactions, appropriate workplace design with natural lighting systems and energy efficient systems, green training and development, green recruitment, and employee participation in environmental programs as frequently related to burnout reduction through stress mitigation, autonomy and well-being, as well as enhancement of work-life balance dimension such as work interference and enhancement of personal life. Thematic mechanisms also emerged, such as flexibility and autonomy via telecommuting that creates balance and stress elimination, digital efficacy that eliminates administrative overhead, sustainable designs that create cognitive clarity and remove fatigue, green training that leads to resilience, self-efficacy and green work-life interface, and employee participation that promotes psychological ownership, purpose and counters cynicism. Placing the GHRM practices in a strategic job resources role in the JD-R theory - with the support of the Resource-Based View, Ability-MotivationOpportunity, and Social Exchange theories - the present study fills a substantial research gap on how green HR balances environmental sustainability and psychological outcomes in the public banking contexts, while allowing policymakers to gain theoretical and empirical evidence on the matter, finding a way to bridge the gaps in the unexplored literature on green rewards.
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