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Perceived Environmental Uncertainty ( Peu )

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Perceived Environmental Uncertainty (PEU): Its value to modern management.
Perceived environmental uncertainty (PEU) is prominent in several business-related fields such as strategic management, accounting and information systems (Dess & Beard 1984, Harrison & Kelly 2006). Many management literature define uncertainty therefore as the “the unpredictability of both environmental and/or organizational variables that have a bearing on corporate performance” (Miller 1993, p.694, Tseng 2008). As a widely studied area in academic literature, the underlying concept of uncertainty is one of the major problems an organisation’s top management faces in modern times. By way of organizations constantly interacting with the globally competitive yet fluctuating environment, there is a definite rise in the level of uncertainty.
In effect, the internal environment of a firm being exempted from the PEU theory’s domain, the external environment of a firm is recognized as the main source of uncertainty. Milliken (1987, p.134) claims that environmental uncertainty within the context of an organisation is any “inability to assign probability as to the likelihood of upcoming events, inadequate information on a cause-effect relationship and one’s failure to make accurate predictions for decision outcomes. She further refers to uncertainty as a person or individual’s inability or failure to predict results. To this extent, she identifies the following as dimensions of uncertainty, state

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