Small business owners’ external information-seeking behaviors: The role of perceived uncertainty and organizational identity complexity

This study examines how small business owners’ perceived uncertainty about their environment interacts with the complexity of their organization’s identity to explain their information seeking from external sources. We hypothesize that perceived uncertainty is positively related to external information seeking, and, organizational complexity, in the form of different organizational identities, complicates this relationship and reduces the information seeking in certain conditions while increases in others. The results extend evidence to prior established relationships between perceived uncertainty and information seeking and also suggest that organizational complexity plays an equally important role as a critical moderator. Additionally, we propose a different classification scheme for the external sources and use this to test our hypotheses.