The Institute for Organization and Management, which has been operating within the University of Maribor, Faculty of Organizational Sciences, since its establishment in 1975, promotes and supports the research-development assignments from the field of organization and human resource functions. Over time, the Institute has developed and expanded its activities also to the field of business and work systems, information systems, and electronic commerce. The further development followed the clear vision and mission of the Institute, reflected in the national and international projects and in promoting the transfer of knowledge from the research into the economic and other organizations. In addition to that, the Institute promotes the cooperation of students, researchers, and industrialists in the common research-development projects. Furthermore, the research-development laboratories and eCentre are organized within the Research Centre that operates within the Institute. The Institute also publishes a Journal for Management, Informatics and Human Resources entitled “Organizacija”. Besides that, the Institute organizes annual international scientific conferences in the fields of Management, Informatics, and Electronic Commerce.

The needs for the implementation of research assignments in the field of operation of organization and human resource function have appeared already at the establishment of the Human Resources Short-Cycle College in 1959. With the emergence of new needs for knowledge and, thereby, also for the researches, the Short-Cycle College for the Organization of Work was established in 1965. The research field began to spread itself also to, for those times, the whole new field of Computer Science. When the study at the second-cycle was enacted in 1974, the school transformed itself into the Institute of Higher Education for Organization of Work. In this respect, the need for a more organized research activity demonstrated itself. Due to that, the Institute for Organization and Management was established in the following year.

Today, the Institute for Organization and Management combines a Research Centre with a little less than 40 registered researchers, working in the laboratories and in the Centre for the Empirical Study of Organizations (CESO).