Making uncertainty manageable: Management control as a coping system in SMEs

Uncertainty is a pervasive condition for contemporary organizations,\r\nyet empirical research has predominantly framed it as external\r\nenvironmental turbulence affecting performance outcomes. This\r\nstudy adopts a managerial and management control perspective to\r\nexamine how firms cope with uncertainty through combinations of\r\nmanagerial practices. Drawing on survey data from 30 small and\r\nmedium-sized enterprises, the study distinguishes between market,\r\nsupply, technological, and financial uncertainty and analyzes their\r\nassociations with planning, organizing, human capital development,\r\nleadership, and controlling practices. The results indicate that\r\nperceived uncertainty is moderate and persistent rather than episodic,\r\nand that external uncertainty alone does not systematically trigger\r\nchanges in managerial systems. Market and supply-side uncertainty\r\nshow limited association with managerial practices, a finding that\r\nitself carries theoretical significance: environmental volatility appears\r\nto be a background condition rather than a direct driver of control\r\nsystem design. Instead, the most robust empirical pattern concerns the\r\nstrong internal coherence among managerial practices. Strategic\r\nplanning, organizational structuring, leadership, human capital\r\ndevelopment, and management control systems are highly interrelated, indicating that firms rely on integrated managerial arrangements to make uncertainty manageable. By shifting attention from\r\nexternal turbulence to the internal integration of managerial practices,\r\nthe study contributes to management control research by showing\r\nthat management control systems function as internally coherent\r\ncoping infrastructures, whose effectiveness lies in systemic coherence\r\nrather than in the activation of isolated control tools in response to\r\nspecific uncertainty sources.