Green jobs create a strong environmental precedent that ensures employee awareness and solves climate change.

Green HRM practices develop the knowledge of employees towards the environment while encouraging them to use this knowledge to achieve organisational goals, which, in turn, leads to performing environmentally friendly behaviour at the workplace. Indeed, employees are known to avoid behaviours for which they lack sufficient knowledge to engage in (Chan et al., 2014). Thus, the role of green HRM practices is to boost the environmental knowledge of employees, so that they can execute EGB at the workplace without hesitation. Several studies argue that for green HRM to be an effective force in creating EGB in the workplace, organisations should have recruiting strategies targeted at hiring and retaining workers possessing environmental beliefs and values like motivation. Therefore, organisations that consider employee environmental performance and effective training programs, as well as provide employees with the opportunity to get involved and participate help to improve the environmental awareness, behaviours, skills and knowledge of their employees (Dumont et al., 2016; Renwick et al., 2013).

When green valued employees are recruited into an organisation, they provide no opposition to environmental sustainability initiatives, and, instead, these employees are passionate about contributing to environmental management initiatives (Jia et al., 2018). When employees are trained, they become more knowledgeable about what and how to mitigate environmental degradation, consequently becoming green champions. The proper and transparent compensation of employees based on their environmental performance enhances the desire of employees to learn more and find more ways to protect the environment (Ren et al., 2018). Finally, the involvement of the employees in decision making through feedback and suggestions reassures employees in their confidence of organisational support for the environment and increases their concern about the environment. Simultaneously, this involvement enhances their commitment to the environment through knowledge sharing (Saeed et al., 2019). When employees are more knowledgeable about the environment, then they will be committed and compelled towards performing EGB.

Even though a key to environmental knowledge of employees is GT, it takes motivated employees with green values, an efficient reward system of environmental performance management, opportunities for employees to contribute to environmental policies to ensure that the environmental knowledge attained can result in an EGB. Rayner and Morgan (2018) indicated that green HRM should ensure the development of the ability, motivation, opportunity and environmental knowledge of employees to allow them to perform the desired green behaviour at work. Hence, this current study uses AMO theory to explain the role of Green HRM on EGB, through the mechanism of the environmental knowledge of employees, which will lead to a competitive advantage for an academic organisation.