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

Uncertainty is a pervasive condition for contemporary organizations, yet empirical research has predominantly framed it as external environmental turbulence affecting performance outcomes. This study adopts a managerial and management control perspective to examine how firms cope with uncertainty through combinations of managerial practices. Drawing on survey data from 30 small and medium-sized enterprises, the study distinguishes between market, supply, technological, and financial uncertainty and analyzes their associations with planning, organizing, human capital development, leadership, and controlling practices. The results indicate that perceived uncertainty is moderate and persistent rather than episodic, and that external uncertainty alone does not systematically trigger changes in managerial systems. Market and supply-side uncertainty show limited association with managerial practices, a finding that itself carries theoretical significance: environmental volatility appears to be a background condition rather than a direct driver of control system design. Instead, the most robust empirical pattern concerns the strong internal coherence among managerial practices. Strategic planning, organizational structuring, leadership, human capital development, and management control systems are highly interrelated, indicating that firms rely on integrated managerial arrangements to make uncertainty manageable. By shifting attention from external turbulence to the internal integration of managerial practices, the study contributes to management control research by showing that management control systems function as internally coherent coping infrastructures, whose effectiveness lies in systemic coherence rather than in the activation of isolated control tools in response to specific uncertainty sources.