One of the reasons for the success of humans on the globe is attributed to our high level of sociality and cooperation skills. When we consider humans to be one biological species, what was the evolutionary driving force of cooperation, and how was it different from other species? To answer these questions, this article reviews various aspects of cooperation found in organisms. The article also explores current understanding of the evolutionary origin of human cooperation by looking back the history of human evolution.

While organizational design has been a central topic in the management and organization researches, our knowledge is still limited to how it affects a successful way of solving collective action problems. In this paper, we introduce Nakama and Kamijo (2019) that focused on coordination and cooperation problems and discuss a relationship between these two problems and organizational designs.

The voluntary contribution behavior is important to encourage the sustainable use of common-pool resources in many communities. Firstly, this paper demonstrates theoretical developments to understand cooperative behavior for common-pool resource problems. Secondly, the paper shows the recent empirical evidence based on a laboratory experiment and field experiment in the developing countries. Finally, the paper discusses how to encourage cooperative behavior for resource conservation based on the empirical evidence.

In social psychology and its related areas, empirical studies using experimental games have been conducted to investigate the mechanisms of human cooperation. This paper overviews representative empirical studies using experimental games and introduces the role of “reciprocity,” which has been known as an important foundation of human cooperation. In addition, the paper introduces the effect of sanction on maintaining a large-scale human cooperative society and discusses possibilities that evidence of empirical studies on human cooperation could be applied to organizational management.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on spontaneous mentoring behavior of individuals and to examine the psychological mechanism and contextual factors behind such behavior. Formal programs adopted by many organizations to manage mentoring behavior have posed various problems. As an alternative, however, we focus on job design among the contextual factors and examine the relationship between job design, mentoring behavior and prosocial motivation.

The aim of this study is to gain an insight into the process of the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) business creation. The findings indicate the critical role of corporate social entrepreneurship (CSE) utilizing a positive mindset and legitimation in accordance with environmental changes. The key factors of promoting CSE in a large firm are also discussed: they consist of the reconsideration of the role and function of corporate social responsibility (CSR) department, human resource management (HRM), organizational mission and tolerance.