The paper presents the stability characteristics of a rotor-bearing system supported by actively controlled hydrodynamic journal bearing. The proportional and derivative controls including coupled motion are adopted for the control algorithm to control the hydrodynamic journal bearing with a circumferentially groove. Also, the cavitation algorithm implementing the Jakobsson-Floberg-Olsson boundary condition is adopted to predict cavitation regions in the fluid film more accurately than a conventional analysis which uses the Reynolds condition. The stability characteristics of a rotor-bearing system supported by actively controlled hydrodynamic journal bearing are investigated for various control gains with the Routh-Hurwitz criteria using the linear dynamic coefficients which are obtained from the perturbation method. It is found that the speed at onset of the instability is increased for both proportional and derivative control of the bearing. It is also found that the proportional and derivative control of the coupled motion is more effective than that of the uncoupled motion.