Mission statements content and readability and their relation to financial and innovation related performance measurements

Mission statements (MS) are the most frequently used management tools for strategic planning (Bart, 2001a). Their main purpose is to answer two essential questions for any organization: what is our business? What should it be? Scholars on the strategic planning field have been studying the relation between MS and performance among private, public, NGO or multilateral (e.g. The World Bank) organizations. In this line, several remarkable results have been found, such as comprehensive and key components analytical frameworks (Campbell, 1989; Pearce, 1982; Lucas, 1998; Tarnow, 2001); and qualitative and quantitative performance evaluation frameworks (Baetz & Bart, 1996; Bartkus et al., 2005). Despite these developments, the literature on MS and performance shows six gaps: 1) an absence of cross-national studies and 2) a disengagement from the global South; 3) no discernible open access digital dataset for replications, triangulation, or further studies; 4) a narrow scope on performance measurements (financial, most of the time); 5) a limited attention on MS readability; and 6) reduced samples. In consequence, we proposed: 1) to conduct cross-national studies on the relation between MS content and readability, and organizational performance related to both financial indicators and innovation; 2) to considerably amplify the samples sizes; and 3) to provide an open access digital dataset for MS from organizations worldwide.

This project aims to analise the mission statements of organizations worldwide and its relation to organizational performance.

The project is ongoing. Key findings will be reported in due course.

2 articles published in journals indexed in either Scopus/WoS