Sustainable HRM and Institutional Performance in Public Organizations under Transformation: The Sustainability of the Institutional Bond as a Diachronic Construct

Abstract

Human resource management (HRM) research has largely organized the evaluation of HR policies around the well-being–performance nexus. However central, this debate remains predominantly synchronic: it captures present states of the employment relationship and, even when it calls for longitudinal designs, it does not theorize the reproduction of the bond over time as a construct in its own right. This conceptual article complements this nexus with a third, diachronic dimension of institutional performance — the sustainability of the institutional bond — defined as the ratio, over time, between the regeneration and the depletion of the relational resources (trust, recognition, fairness, meaning) that make engagement possible. Drawing on sustainable HRM, the psychological contract, social exchange theory and perceived organizational support, it explicitly distinguishes this construct from adjacent present-state notions (well-being, engagement, retention) and from competing temporal constructs (sustainable careers, sustainable work systems, harm of work). The article proposes a three-dimensional architecture — social performance, operational performance, and sustainability of the bond — together with theoretical propositions and a relational debt mechanism, capturing configurations in which an organization may deliver present performance while eroding the relational conditions of its own continuity. The framework thereby contributes to the evaluation of the sustainable performance of public organizations under transformation, whose boundary conditions and operationalization paths it specifies.