Empirical Study On The Impact Of Mission Statements Quality On Enterprise Performance

Corporate mission, as the core starting point of strategic management and the core idea of corporate culture,should be taken seriously. The corporate mission statement, known as its external manifestations andwritten statement, has gradually become a tool combined of strategic management and culturalmanagement and is worthy of more attention and research. It is the first and critic step in corporate strategicplanning. Mission statement specifies the "business goals" or "existence reasons". It can give answers to thefollowing three basic questions, what the company is, what the company will become and what companiesshould be. It provides policy guidance for the enterprise while guiding the development direction of theenterprise; Meanwhile, as an important part of corporate culture, the mission statement is a symbol ofcorporate culture·s idea layer, clarifying the behavior guidelines and values for corporations. Attitude iseverything, ideology instructs action. The core competitiveness is no longer reflected only on the hardware·, but more and more on software·like philosophy, ideology, mission, values·, which is the soulof the enterprise. The mission statement has gradually become an important tool for self-promotion andimage-establishment, by mission statement, enterprises can position themselves differently from others.In this paper, world top500enterprises published on Fortune Chinese network in2013were selected asstudy objects, of which150enterprises were selected as research samples. Based on the theme of theimpact of mission statement quality on enterprise performance, the relationship between high/low qualitymission statement layers and enterprise performance is discussed. First, based on theoretical analysis,combined with the previous empirical results, the mission statement quality evaluation model wasconstructed; then, content-analysis method was adopted to code mission statement quality evaluationindicators, putting forward hypotheses on the relationship between mission statements of different qualitiesand enterprise performance before evaluating the corporate mission statement by the above indicators;finally, SPSS19.0was adopted to undertake statistical analysis and correlation analysis to the variables, andresearch hypotheses was analyzed by ANOVA.The results showed that there actually exists correlation between the mission statement quality andenterprise performance: there exists a negative correlation between low quality mission statement andenterprise performance, while a positive correlation exists between high-quality mission statement andenterprise performance. It is found that within low quality mission statement, focusing on products orservices, focusing on profits, one big goal and financial objectives had a prominent negative correlationwith enterprise performance, while high quality mission statement like critic philosophy element,non-materialistic vision, caring for society, caring for customers, behavior guidelines and self acknowledgehad a prominent positive correlation with enterprise performance. Results of this study made contributionto the enrichment of the content of this field, the innovation in this study is trying to divide the corporatemission statement by a new dimension from the systematic perspective. The empirical results can guidecompanies to rethink the mission statement to decide what is most conducive to long-term development ofenterprises, and they also have practical significance for enterprises to formulate high-quality corporatemission statements.