MISSION STATEMENT ACCOMPLISHED: PROMISES AND CHALLENGES IN USING E-PARTICIPATION FOR MISSION STATEMENT DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Mission statements are written declarations that summarize and communicate an organization’s core values and strategies and present managerial tools that can be used to motivate employees by creating a common self-understanding of an organization. With politics aiming to become ever more inclusive and participative ranging from the local to the global level, new technologies and findings about possibilities of self-determined, collaborative work from the field of e-participation emerge, which can be transferred onto organizational participation. We therefore present a procedure for incorporating e-participation approaches in mission statement creation processes to make place for more collaborative and open processes. This paper presents an eight-step nominal group process for the participative online creation of a mission statement. The process was tested and evaluated within three consecutive studies that surrounded different stages of a mission statement development, which relied on an existing e-participation platform. Our core findings show that (1) the participants of this initiative considered the use of e-participation to be helpful for mission statement creation and generally support the proposed process structure, (2) the platform’s suitability for developing mission statements was reviewed critically, making suggestions for important criteria of digital mission statement creation tools that should be met, and (3) participants could identify themselves with the final mission statement more strongly because of their own participation in the development process. While observing overall support for the suggested mission statement creation procedure, we build on the results of our studies to make suggestions for the design of e-participation platforms that will make them even more suitable for mission statement development.