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.
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