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INTRODUCTION
A business is not defined by its name, statutes or articles of incorporation. It is defined by the business mission. Only a clear definition of the mission and purpose of the organization makes possible clear and realistic business objectives.
Peter Drucker (1973).
Mission statements have traditionally been defined as a written declaration that communicates the purpose of an organisation (Bart & Hupfer, 2004; Macedo, Pinho, & Silva, 2016). According to the annual report of Bain & Co. (Rigby & Bilodeau, 2015), the mission statement is one of the most widely used managerial tools worldwide. It became popular in the early 1980s, and since then it has received considerable attention from managers and academics. In the last decades, different interrogates have been addressed in the literature concerning mission statements: What is a mission statement? Is there any advantage for organisations to explicitly define their company’s mission statement? Is the mission statement really a useful managerial tool? Do managers actually refer to the mission statement and use it as a guidance for their strategic decisions? What components should a mission statement include, and which ones should it not? In this article, we examine this 35-year-long body of research on mission statements. The ultimate goal is to provide a comprehensive view of published academic research on mission statements and based on this, put forward directions for future research on this field.
Using a systematic review process, we identified 53 academic articles that specifically deal with mission statements. The main themes can be grouped into four categories: (i) mission statement development, (ii) mission statement components, (iii) mission impact on employees, and (iv) mission impact on organisational performance. We describe in detail each of these groups and identify research gaps and avenues for future research. Surprisingly, although the mission statement is one of the most commonly used managerial tools, and despite more than 30 years of research, studies in the area of mission statements have a predominant practical orientation and very limited theoretical development.
RESEARCH METHODS
Following the systematic literature review process suggested by Tranfield, Denyer, and Smart (2003), we began by defining the research objectives. In our case the objective was to do a thorough review of all aspects concerning mission statements. To that end,...