Management Organization and Human Nature: An introduction1

Understanding humans is hard; so is understanding groups of humans, such as organizations. But just because something is hard, and just be-cause anything resembling complete success is unattainable for a long way off doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth trying. It is after all what anthropol-ogists, psychologists, economists and organization scholars and others work on every day. We do think that it is worth trying. The fields of psychology, anthropology, economics, and cognitive science are coming to recognize explicitly that an understanding of how humans behave, think, feel and react as individuals and in groups requires an under-standing of our evolved human nature. These fields are among the ones that management scholars draw on in developing theories of management and or-ganization. The evolutionary approach to the study of human sciences is by no means a dominant or uncontroversial approach in those fields. Misappre-hensions based on misunderstandings (which we discuss below) have made discussion of evolution and human nature taboo in many places. But discus