The real mission of the mission statement: A systematic review of the literature

Abstract

A mission statement is a widely used strategic tool that emphasises an organisation’s uniqueness and identity. It was in the early 1980s that academics, managers, and consultants recognised the need for explicitly formulating a mission statement in organisations. Since then, mission statements have remained as a popular strategic tool in organisations. This article conducts a systematic literature review to synthesise research on mission statements. The analysis of the 53 articles selected includes a bibliometric and content analysis. According to their perspective, the works selected were grouped into four thematic areas: (1) mission statement development, (2) mission statement components, (3) mission impact on employees, and (4) mission impact on performance. The overreaching conclusion is that mission statements are widely used in practice but poorly researched in theory. Most articles adopt a managerial phenomenon-based strand, lacking a deep theoretical foundation. The article ends with suggestions for further research in terms of theory, practice, and methodology.

Missions of Russian Cheese Producers: Principal Components and Relevance for Rural Communities

“…Recognition of these components in the available mission statements is possible by qualitative content analysis, i.e., finding words and expressions relevant to these components. This approach is used widely in modern strategic management research, irrespective of industry and business size [19,[25][26][27][28][29]. The 'standard' principal components, proposed initially by Pearce and David [24], were soon updated by David [30].…”

“…Mission statements are an important tool for strategic management since they provide a brief explanation of general goals, intentions, and priorities of a given enterprise to be shared and followed by managerial and other staff [19][20][21][22][23]. They are consequently also important for customers, partners and competitors, i.e., they serve as instruments positioning an enterprise or organization in the market.…”

“…Such an analysis and comparison can be performed since mission statements are often provided on-line, i.e., on official web-pages of organizations. About three decades ago, Pearce and David [24] demonstrated the efficiency of such an analysis of mission statements, and a series of studies based on these principles now constitute the basis for a new direction of strategic management research [19].…”

Environmental Concerns of Russian Businesses: Top Company Missions and Climate Change Agenda

“…These experts explained the purposes of missions in the modern world business, standardized the content of mission statements, and proposed the component-based analysis of these statements. Their developments formed a solid ground for mission statement analysis as an individual research direction that has become popular in managerial studies [66,67]. Although various aspects of mission statements are analyzed by different specialists, many pay attention to the presence of some specific components.…”

Mission Statements in Port Authorities: Empirical Analysis of Content in Spanish Port System

“…Although MS's started to be explicitly formulated from early 1980s (Pearce, 1982;Pearce and David, 1987) and there is a general consensus about the importance of its proper formulation, researchers have paid poor attention to deeply analyze the issue from the theoretical point of view (Sashittal and Tankersley, 1997;Amato and Amato, 2002;David et al, 2014;Alegre et al, 2018). Pearce (1982) defined the company mission as "a broadly defined but enduring statement of purpose that distinguishes a business from other firms of its type and identifies the scope of its operations in product and market terms. "…”