The purpose of this paper is to introduce the Green–Naghdi theory of type III to study the influence of thermal loading due to laser pulse on the wave propagation of generalized micropolar thermoelasticity. The bounding plane surface is heated by a non-Gaussian laser beam with a pulse duration of 8 ps. The problem has been solved by using the normal mode analysis. The thermal shock problem is studied to obtain the exact expressions for the displacement components, force stresses, temperature, couple stresses and microrotation. The distributions of the considered variables are illustrated graphically. Comparisons are made with the results predicted by both types of Green–Naghdi theory for different values of time.