Perceived strategic uncertainty and early recognition of changes in business environment: A study of selected Polish innovative companies

Abstract

Contemporary business organizations are facing increasingly turbulent environments, ones dramatically complex and changeable, where changes occur rapidly, are difficult to foresee, and emerge from discontinuous processes. This commonly acknowledged growing turbulence of most organizations’ environments calls for a new kind of action, which would restore at least some control over the environment to decision makers within their organizations. This new kind of action is collecting information in form of weak signals by early recognition systems. Previous body of research strongly suggests that the more strategic uncertainty in the environment is perceived by managers and decision makers, the more advanced early recognition systems tend to be. The system’s advancement is understood as the intensity with which the objective of early recognition is perused. Drawing on the existing research, coming mostly from English-language scholarly literature, as well as the author’s own empirical research conducted among Polish innovative Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises, the author attempts to empirically confirm hypothesized effects the environment perceived as uncertain have on business organizations, that is their proneness to engage in early recognition, as well as the intensity with which they approach the problem of weak signal detection and understanding. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is the first to address these assumption in the context of Polish business organizations, and it provides additional supporting proof for the current theory.