The human need to organize and manage personal and societal affairs in order to achieve a cogent goal or goals undoubtedly goes back to the beginnings of human civilization. When primitive societies developed hunting parties, defense activities, or even campsites, organization behavior was needed in order to establish a hierarchy of time and task management. As activities grew and management of time and information became more complex, the need for written records on organizational behavior grew. Out of this growth came the modern theories of organization, and their resultant applications (So What About Success Rates?, 1986, pp. 5-6).
In fact, in the last century, things changed in a dramatic way. The advent of technology and the Industrial Revolution produced businesses and organizations that were of a size and magnitude never heard of before. These organizations produced goods, products, and services for an increasing number of people. With the increasing size came a trend toward the urbanization of the workforce and an emerging labor movement to counter the type of managerial practices so common in those times. As urbanization proceeded, there came a need for large non-business or non-corporate organizations to provide services for the rest of the population; for example, schools, hospitals, social agencies, and governmental and bureaucratic institutions. Each of these institutions, and even sometimes in combination with one another, presented their own unique problems of organizational behavior and theoretical aspects (Boone and Bowen, 1987, pp. 1-3).
Some of this change was not necessarily positive in the organizational or behavioral view. For instance,
In the modern corporation, no explosion of personal computers, no new telecommunications gear or software packages, no eight-color strategic matrix or refinement of ROI calculations - in short, none of the technical apparatus of management - can change this situ...