How sustainable human resources management helps in the evaluation and planning of employee loyalty and retention: Can social capital make a difference?

Abstract

Researchers establish that the current challenges of human resources management to attract and retain talent are based on fostering and increasing the participation of relationships with employees and sustainably managing the organization and teams. The objective of this article is to evaluate the effect that sustainable human resource management has on social capital, and employee retention and loyalty programs. The information required to carry out the empirical analysis was obtained from an online survey to Spanish universities. Data processing was conducted by using the PLS-SEM technique. The results obtained show that social sustainability actions influence the social capital perceived by employees significantly and that social capital influences their loyalty and retention significantly. However, we found that social sustainability actions influence employee loyalty and retention significantly and positively only when it mediates between social capital. This research contributes to the management of organizations and suggests human capital managers to have a greater relational management of human resources in the connection, involvement and transparency of their social sustainability actions in order to achieve greater loyalty and retention ratios, better performance of the organization and, in general, a greater benefit for society.

Keywords: Higher education; Human resource management; Loyalty; Mediating effect; Retention; Social capital; Sustainability.