Relationship Between Mission Statement and Company Performance

Mission statement is a managerial tool which has the power of directing the behaviour in a company. The important question we can ask is whether the existence of a mission statement is associated with company performance or not. Findings of different studies exploring this relationship are not very conclusive. Besides, mission statements often comprise of different components or dimensions. It seems that relationship between the mission statement and company performance depends on mission statement dimensions as well. In our research based on a sample of 394 Slovenian companies we explore the links between the existences of a mission statement and its components on one side, and different measures of company performance on the other. We recognised value added per employee (VAE) as the only performance measure associated with existence or non-existence of mission statement. Besides, VAE is associated with two possible mission statement dimensions - focus on relationships and focus on company resources