Sustainable human resource management (HRM) has become a crucial approach for organizations striving to align their business objectives with environmental, social and governance (ESG) and sustainable development goals (SDGs). The aim of this study is to (a) identify and categorize sustainable HRM practices relevant to the Indian IT sector; (b) prioritize the practices and (c) interpret the interrelationships through ability–motivation–opportunity and stakeholder theories. The fuzzy Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory technique is applied to evaluate the significance of sustainable HRM practices based on a fuzzy direct-relation matrix, normalization, total-relation matrix and defuzzified crisp matrix. The thresholding yielded the causal network diagram. In total, 14 domain experts from the Indian information technology sector evaluated pairwise influences of the practices using a five-level linguistic scale. Through computational analysis, the study identifies interdependencies among these practices and ranks them based on their impact. Staffing, performance appraisal and career management, compensation, training and development, work–family balance and diversity promotion and occupational health and safety were identified as the six core sustainable HRM practices. The findings reveal that performance appraisal and career management, compensation and staffing hold the top ranks. This study offers a ranked, cause-and-effect framework linking sustainable HRM practices to SDGs, illustrating how ability (staffing), motivation (compensation) and opportunity (health and safety) collectively drive performance appraisal and career growth. Grounded in stakeholder theory, it shows how employee-focused levers create system-wide sustainability benefits. The findings enable managers and HR leaders to prioritize practices for maximum strategic impact, while offering actionable, sector-specific recommendations to advance long-term sustainability.
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