Divergence between informant and archival measures of the environment: Real differences, artifact, or perceptual error?

Although organizational environments are a central concern for researchers in organization theory and strategy, many researchers report that informant assessments and archival measures of the environment do not converge. This study investigates whether the observed divergence can be attributed to perceptual error, to real differences in constructive definitions, to differences between a firm's environment and an aggregate industry environment, or simply to methodological artifacts. Results show that environmental uncertainty and environmental variation are distinct multidimensional constructs even when only informant measures from the same respondents are considered, and that organizational level mediating filters are more strongly related to informant measures of environmental variation than to environmental uncertainty. However, the effects of individual level filters on environmental variation do not decrease after controlling for organizational level filters. We conclude that, although there are some real differences between informant and archival measures of the environment, the possibility of perceptual bias cannot be ruled out.