Toward a new conceptual framework of business strategies to deal with environmental uncertainties: insights from a systematic literature review and bibliography

Environmental uncertainty has emerged as an inevitable and complex phenomenon for businesses. In recent years, researchers have increasingly focused on developing effective business strategies to deal with the effects of environmental uncertainties, resulting in a plethora of scholarly articles on the topic. This article employs an inductive systematic literature review, provides bibliographic descriptions, and proposes future research directions. In addition, we introduce a novel framework of strategies to deal with environmental uncertainties. After a rigorous multi-step selection process, we selected 67 journal articles. We conducted a thematic analysis of qualitative data extracted from the selected articles and identified 145 codes that represent 4 global themes, 23 organizing themes, and 118 basic themes. Our review highlights four distinct types of strategy: anticipation strategy to prepare businesses in advance of uncertainties; adaptation strategy to deal with uncertainties that have occurred; embracing strategy to increase the likelihood of desirable uncertainties; and modification strategy to minimize the likelihood of undesirable uncertainties.