Developing an effective mission statement for a health care organization: a step towards an evidence-based practice

Background <br>Despite the omnipresence of mission statements, studies indicate that creating an effective mission statement is extremely difficult. <br>Purposes <br>Given the increasing pressure on health care administrators to develop an effective mission statement, this article sought to devise a state of the art of empirical mission statement research in order to develop a set of empirical based recommendations on how to successfully develop a mission statement within a health care organization. <br>Methodology/Approach <br>The applied review strategy is based upon the systematic literature review process for management research initialized by Tranfield, Denyer and Smart (2003). In total, 7 electronic databases were systematically scanned in order to identify all empirical articles addressing the concept of mission statements within a health care related setting. <br>Findings <br>The systematic literature review identified 21 suitable articles. Descriptive and thematic analysis of the identified articles resulted in a mission statement development template and recommendations for future research. <br>Practice Implications <br>The conducted literature analysis allowed us to distill 10 empirically grounded recommendations on how to successfully develop, formulate and implement a mission statement within a health care organization.