What do airline mission statements reveal about value and strategy?
Introduction
A mission statement is crucial to success in effective strategic management (Bart et al., 2001), which not only reflects the value of a company, but also serves as a tool for the growth and development of the company (Alavi and Karami, 2009). Mission statements are for communicating the culture and value propositions within the company, while some are specifically for conveying the messages to external stakeholders regarding profitability and customer satisfaction.
Among various kinds of service industries, the airline industry has its own distinct industry specifics: airlines share similar business models. To effectively communicate the values across an organization within the airline industry, a proper mission statement enriched with the values and culture of the organization is essential.
Mission statements can reveal distinct operational performance and financial outcomes. Therefore, for a comprehensive evaluation of an organization's performance, mission statements should be reviewed so that the core values embedded can be identified (Bart, 2007; Bartkus et al., 2004, 2006; Bartkus and Glassman, 2008).
Most airlines worldwide have their own unique mission statements (IATA, 2016), however, there have been only a few studies relating to the mission statements of airline companies. The importance of the mission statement study has been neglected and this research adds to the existing knowledge of the role that mission statements play in airline management. This study aims to identify the key values embedded in the mission statements of airline companies and additionally to reveal which airlines share similar mission statements and what is the common context. In order to achieve this goal, the mission statements of 200 of the best ranked airlines worldwide were collected and analyzed. Content analysis and network analysis are the methods used to explore the key content dimensions from the mission statements.
The rest of the paper is constructed as follows: in section 2, we present the theoretical background of the research and two research questions are posed. Section 3 describes the methodology used in the paper, while Section 4 shows the results. Section 5 provides discussion of the results and the last section gives the conclusions.
Section snippets
From organization vision, mission to strategy
Organizations have visions of their desired future, which define the conceptual roadmap or strategic direction (Mirvis et al., 2010). Vision is considered as the driving force for organizations for gaining competitive advantage since vision influences intra-organizational development (Sutcliffe and Vogus, 2003; Costanza et al., 2015; Klimas, 2016). A vision statement also describes how the future will look if the organization achieves its mission, containing information that is realistic,
The sample
In this study, 200 top tier airlines’ (as ranked by Skytrax) mission statements were collected. The airlines are mostly from two regions, Asia (including Asia Pacific) and Europe, according to ranking listed by Skytrax. In this section, by considering the number of airlines from the different regions, we focus on the airlines from Asia (Asia Pacific) and Europe, as these two regions have most of the top 200 airlines.
Asia, with a highly competitive and active market, provides enormous
Results
After data preprocessing, the number of words is now reduced to 153 from initial 1319 words. The list of the 20 most frequent words is presented in Table 1, with the frequency and its percentage.
From Table 1, we can observe that the word ‘service’ can be found in 125 mission statements which is 62.5% of the total. Only three words (beside ‘service’, ‘airline’ and ‘customer’) are included in more than 50% of all mission statements. Words in the mission statements can be further analyzed with
Discussion
Referring to the first research question, with the identified 6 content dimensions: ‘service oriented’, ‘customer oriented’, ‘concern for stakeholders’, ‘concern for strategy’, ‘gaining competitive advantage’ and ‘development’, missions statements can have two main objectives. First, to let the related stakeholders (customers, partners, employees, etc.) have a clear message about how the companies state their values by offering the best services, as the obligation of an airline; second, to
Conclusions
The results obtained in this study present the six content dimensions of mission statements among the top airlines in the world. These six content dimensions are: ‘service’, ‘customer’, ‘concern for stakeholders’, ‘concern for strategy’, ‘competitive advantage’ and ‘development’. The study indicates that airlines pose their mission values in two different mission statement formulation practices: ‘services and expectations’ and ‘vision and strategy’. ‘Service’, ‘customer’ and ‘concern for
Authors' contributions
The order of the authors is arbitrary as both authors evaluate their contributions equal. KL prepared the theoretical part and KB prepared the methodological part. Other parts were of equal contributions.
Acknowledgements
Authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions that significantly improved the paper.
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