The bright side of environmental uncertainty for organizational learning: the moderating role of political skill

The literature on strategic entrepreneurship suggests that organizations can overcome their limitations by aligning their learning-oriented strategies with environmental conditions. However, previous studies have primarily focused on the “dark side” of environmental uncertainty and have neglected its “bright side.” Informed by organizational learning theory and using data collected from 90 managers and 294 employees of Vietnamese firms, we posit that environmental uncertainty prompts the formation of internal marketing and managerial ties that become sources of learning, which promotes employees’ self-learning behaviors and firms’ external learning capabilities. Enterprises in an uncertain environment prefer to leverage political ties rather than business ties, although the latter are an important mechanism for facilitating firms’ external learning capabilities. Our findings also show that the indirect relationship between environmental uncertainty and employees’ self-learning behavior via internal marketing is stronger in firms with managers who possess high levels of political skills.