Perceived trends and uncertainty in the hotel industry: an exploratory investigation

This paper describes the outcome of an exploratory study conducted on how organizations perceive environmental changes. Based on the notion of the separation of task and general environments, we proposed a conceptual framework to a convenience group of hotel managers which they used to identify changes in the external environment of their organizations. We found that organizations place a greater importance on changes in their task environment than in the more general environment. There was less agreement on the interpretation of particular trends than on the trends’ existence. Next we surveyed a second group of managers on the uncertainty linked to these trends, dividing this uncertainty into state, effect and response uncertainty. We tested a number of hypotheses about the relationship between the three types of uncertainty. The results showed that these managers generally felt less state uncertainty than effect uncertainty, and less effect uncertainty than response uncertainty. In general our results lend support to the contention that the interpretative process of environmental change can be broken down into three steps, each leading to a specific and differentiable type of perceived environmental uncertainty