Mission statement: an analysis of the effectiveness and main elements found in the missions of brazilian publicly traded companies

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to objectively evaluate elements of mission statements of publicly traded companies in Brazil. For this purpose 557 companies on the BOVESPA website were selected for analysis. However, the great majority of these companies had no electronic address or did not disclose their mission on their address. Therefore, the study was restricted to 140 organizations that had data available for analysis. In order to test the elements found in the missions of the Brazilian companies, first the elements present in the collected phrases were selected. Then the mission effective index model was chosen as proposed by Pearce (1982). According to the author, to be effective a mission must have eight basic elements to serve as a guide for strategic planning. According to data available the main elements present in missions of these Brazilian companies are customers, products or services and context or market segment. As for effectiveness, most of the companies analyzed (50) presented only three of the eight elements proposed by Pearce (1982). The conclusion, according to the proposal of Pearce (1982), is that there is a long way to go for the companies studied to make their missions statements play an effective role in strategic planning.