Determining Mission Statement Effectiveness from a Fit Perspective

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between the organization's mission statement and its outcomes from a fit perspective in the alignment of the organization's structural and cultural elements. Based on an extension of Campbell's (1991) mission model by combination of ideas from two schools of thought in mission statement studies (structural and cultural), the authors introduce the concept of “fit” to show how it contributes towards a new mission statement model. The results show that both alignments are important to create a fit situation in order to positively impact organization outcomes. Based on Cohen (1988), the detected effect size of .322 is considered large. The managerial implication is that there should be more focus on managing organisational alignment to support a fit situation as this is instrumental to mission statement effectiveness. The originality of this study stems from the idea that while past studies develop model based on ideas from within the confine of a particular school of thought, this study is one of the first to combine ideas from both the structural and cultural schools of thought by extending Campbell's (1991) mission model using the fit perspective.

Keywords

• mission statement
• sense of mission
• alignment
• fit
• structure
• culture
• effectiveness
• purpose