Does your mission statement have any value? An explorative analysis of the effectiveness of mission statements from a communication perspective

Convinced that it will improve their performance, the majority of public and non-profit organizations has developed a formal mission statement. However, despite its popularity, the assumed mission statement-performance hypothesis seems to be barely analyzed nor tested (Weiss and Piderit 1999). We addressed this issue by empirically examining the effectiveness of mission statements from an intra-organizational communication perspective and tested a theoretical rationale explaining the mission statement-performance hypothesis. The study results indicated that mission statements stimulate organizational members to engage in information conveyance and convergence processes, which prove to be positively related with the level of mission motivation. Higher levels of mission motivation, in turn, are assumed to be related with higher organizational performance.