Autonomous work groups are composed of team human resource management, team autonomy and multiskilling. These components have positive effects, but little quantitative research has explicitly examined these effects in Japanese hospitals. The purpose of this study is to examine the degree to which team human resource management and team autonomy would be associated with quality of working life levels, and whether multiskilling would mediate these relations. To test this model, using a sample of 302 Japanese medical professions working for hospital organizations in Japan. Based on multiple regression analysis and the bootstrapping method, two findings were revealed. First, both team human resource management and team autonomy were significantly and positively related to quality of working life. Second, multiskilling was evidenced to partially mediate the effects of team human resource management and team autonomy on quality of working life. These results provide further empirical support for autonomous work groups in hospital organizations, and also evidence to promote autonomous work groups to workplaces affected by the service economy and knowledge economy.

In recent years, mergers and acquisitions（M&A）have become a popular strategy in business. To succeed, companies need to deal with human resource management（HRM）issues appropriately. The main challenge of HRM in M&A is for acquiring companies to apply and integrate their HRM systems to acquired companies because it easily causes problems related to acquired companies such as resistance of acquired employees. To deal with these issues and complete the integration of HRM systems, HR managers need to play different roles simultaneously. Surprisingly, most of the existing researches focus only on acquiring HR managers, but not on acquired HR managers, whose significant roles related to acquired employees are suggested in some researches. This study addresses existing research gaps by investigating the roles of HR managers of not only the acquirer but also the acquired side.

In this study, the roles of HR managers are analyzed based on interviews with HR managers in Japanese department stores that have successfully integrated HRM systems. This study applies the framework of Antila （2005）, which combines Ulrichʼs HR four roles model（1997）with M&A three stages, and further adds division of the acquirer and the acquiree. The existing researches argue that the four roles are essential but require balances of tension between the roles that are difficult to achieve. Nevertheless, the results of this analysis show that the four roles are balanced in the way that the acquiring HR managers play a strategic role by themselves, by contrast, the roles related to employees and operations are shared and cooperated with the acquired HR managers.

Moreover, it turns out that the HR roles between acquiring and acquired HR managers change as integration progress. During pre-combination, the acquiring HR managers are solely responsible for the future HR-related plans to apply the acquiring strategy to the acquiree, while cooperating with the acquired HR managers in the day-to-day roles that tend to conflict with the strategic roles such as future planning. During combination, the acquiring HR managers play the roles that reflect the management perspective, such as creating the HRM systems, while relying on the acquired HR managers to communicate with the acquired employees, where conflict with the management needs can easily occur. In other words, it is possible to be interpreted that the roles that the acquiring HR managers difficult to balance by themselves change as the M&A process progresses, and the roles that the acquired HR managers are involved in also change accordingly.

The contribution of this study is to suggest that extending the focus not only to acquiring HR managers but also to acquired HR managers and adding the viewpoint of sharing and cooperating is effective for the implementation of strategies of an acquirer in M&A. However, because it is based on a single case, generalization requires additional research. Besides, studying the different roles of HR managers under different conditions, such as various types of M&A strategies and goals, can be a future research topic.

The purpose of this paper is to review conceptual research on the concept of “overall fairness” , which has attracted much attention in recent years in the field of organizational justice research. The concept of overall fairness is defined as “the global evaluations of the fairness of an entity based on personal experiences as well as on the experiences of others” . Based on the conceptual debate on overall fairness that developed in the 1990s and 2000s, this paper will summarize the background of researchersʼ interest in the concept and how they conceptualized the concept of inclusive justice.

In the first half of this paper, I try to relate the growing interest of researchers in the concept of overall fairness to the changes in researchersʼ core issues that have occurred in organizational justice research since the late 1980s. Then I summarize the limitations of organizational justice as existing concept and the usefulness of the concept of overall fairness for examining new issues. In the latter half of this paper, I will organize how researchers have conceptualized and operationalized overall fairness in order to examine new issues in organizational justice research. In particular, this paper will explain three representative ideas that constitute the definition of overall fairness concept, called “total justice model”, “justice heuristics theory”, and “entity justice”, as well as two approaches to operationalizing overall fairness. Finally, I will summarize the contents of this paper and present the significance of focusing on overall fairness and the prospects for future research.

This paper summarizes research relevant to the effect of management of employees with disabilities, on the attitudes and behavior of employees with disabilities and the employment rate of people with disabilities in companies, and suggests directions for future research. The literatures on management of employees with disabilities are divided into three categories: ⑴ corporate policies of disability employment and HR practices for persons with disabilities, ⑵ behavior of supervisors and colleagues around employees with disabilities, and ⑶ reasonable accommodations provided individually to employees with disabilities. The following four points are presented as future directions. First, there is a need for comprehensive research on the management of employees with disabilities in the workplace by integrating research on leadership, HR practices, and reasonable accommodation. Second, in contrast to accumulated research on corporate policies of disability employment and the design of HR practices, there is a lack of accumulated research on the implementation of HR practices. So further research is needed. Third, since there are conflicting results on the effects of reasonable accommodation for people with disabilities, future research should investigate the boundary conditions for the effectiveness of management of employees with disabilities, including reasonable accommodation, HR practices, and the behavior of supervisors and colleagues. Finally, because based on the social identity theory, the research fields are concentrated in the workplaces where the people with disabilities are distributed. Therefore, a comprehensive view of employment of people with disabilities in Japan should be taken by comparing and examining the workplaces where the employees with disabilities are centrally positioned with the workplaces where the employees with disabilities are distributed.

The purpose of this paper is to review research done on mismatches of working hours. Work hours mismatches are one of important indicators that capture workersʼ subjective sense of comfortability at work. For the achievement of Work-Life-Balance, it is important to close the gap between hours workers want to work for and hours they actually work for. A non-negligible proportion of workers feels mismatches between the desired amount of working hours and their actual working hours. According to several empirical studies, most of the workerʼs felt mismatches are categorized as “over-employment” , which means actual working hours exceed desired working hours. These mismatches are often created by changes of gender and family roles during workers’ life course. They also have negative effects on workers’ health, well-being, and job/life satisfaction. However, the mismatches are not necessarily durable in longitudinal perspectives, and workers have been usually experiencing oscillations between work comfortability and un-comfortability during their life course. Job changes often resolve the mismatches by adjusting actual working hours to desired working hours but not vice versa. From the firms’ point of view, this also imply the mismatches can increase a risk of employees’ turnover.

Research on work hours mismatches has important theoretical implications for studies on working hours. In their life course, workers have been often experiencing work hours mismatches created by demand-side and institutional factors, but they also have some options to adjust those mismatches themselves, such as by changing their jobs. That is, mechanisms of determining working hours should be studied from both two perspectives: one is an approach typically seen in the theory of neo-classical labor supply which empathizes individual free choices of working hours, the other is an approach developed in the theory of labor demand and sociology which consider work hours constraints.

Psychological Ownership（PO）may lead to a wide range of positive outcomes at work and nonwork environment, has for a long time attracted the interest of scholars from various disciplines. I provide an integrative and comprehensive review of the research on individual- level PO spanning 20 years（2001–2021）, to provide an overview of the definition and development of psychological ownership within management fields.

First, I introduce the basic definition of different forms of PO, then I review empirical findings to identify the antecedents and outcomes of PO at workplace. Finally, I suggest the direction for future research.