Different Factors of Mission Alignment Process Business Essay

Practice what you preach." "Walk your talk." "Actions speak louder than words." These are all phrases commonly used to describe the expectation that words should match behaviors. Mission is the "foundation upon which decision makers can build corporate strategic planning processes" (Pearce and Roth, 1988, p. 39). A mission statement defines the purpose of the organization; it acts as the 'invisible hand' that guides people within the organization so that they can work independently and yet collectively to achieve desired levels of organization performance (Kotler et al., 1996). This suggests that the mission is the basis for internal policies and procedures. According to Bart, Bontis and Taggar (2001) a clearly written mission statements are more likely to be aligned with a firm's internal policies and systems, and better alignment is more likely to result in an effective guide for employees. (Bartkus and Glassman, 2008) A firm's mission statement is an enduring statement of purpose that distinguishes its business from its peer firms, identifies its scope of operations, embodies its business philosophy and reflects the image it seeks to project (Toftoy and Chatterjee, 2004).The mission statement is expected to guide and direct employees and managers (Campbell, 1997; Ireland and Hitt, 1992).Missions typically include clear references to financial performance, environmental responsibility, employee respect, and excellence in customer service, too often it is only financial performance that gets measured and managed while the other equally important parts of the mission get lost in noble words (Desmidt, Prinzie and Decramer,. 2011). In other words, there is a gap between what the mission says and what people in the organization believe is management's real message. This gap is a result of the lack of alignment among the managerial tools of policies, procedures, and practices with the mission. This lack of alignment confuses everyone about what the mission really is as they try to implement it. (Crotts el at., 2005). The study by Crotts el at (2005) shows the linkage between organizational mission and financial performance founded that the degree to which an organization aligns its internal structure, policies, and procedures with its mission was positively associated with employee behavior which had the most direct relationship with financial performance. Mission statements are intended to motivate (and in so doing, control) the behavior of organizational members towards common organizational goals (Bart el al., 2001) The Mission Alignment Audit Process Defines the outcomes of the mission in measurable terms it Identify key policies, procedures and practices that cue employee behavior (e.g., job descriptions, annual plans) .It also creates an audit of whether or not the mission is included in each key policy, procedure, and practice of an organization and at the end mission alignment process fix and align any item that is out of alignment and compares the audit results against the mission outcome measurement to a firm value of alignment (Crotts el at. 2005). The mission and organizational alignment includes the functional effectiveness of human resource functions, the involvement and alignment of human resource with the firms business strategy the role of the human resource functions in organizations as a business partner, and the leadership style of top management including the success in communication the firm mission(Huselid and Becker, 1997) .Huselid and Baker believes that each of mission alignment step is an integral part of an organizational context that supports and reinforces the returns from a high performance human resource system. Bart and Baetz (1998) were the first researchers to introduce the concept of mission and organizational alignment as potentially important factors to a mission influence over employee behavior. The authors observed that the degree to which an organization aligned its structure, system and procedure with its mission represented one of the most powerful, positive and most pervasive relationships with performance in general, but especially with employee behavior. Al-Anzi (2009) presented the key factors that affect employees' productivity and performance fall into two categories. First those factors that are driven by procedures, protocols and management requirements and secondly those factors that arise from premises, office or factory design. Employees have always been a dominant component of mission statements, demonstrating the organization's attitude and commitment to employee's development (Strong, 1997). When organizational recruitment, rewards and information systems are aligned with the specific components in a mission statement they serve to reinforce for employees the message in the mission. This is because a high degree of organizational mission alignment tightens the focuses and priorities and makes clear the direction in which an organization is headed (Bart and Baetz, 1998).Strong (1997) stated that 35% of all organizations incorporate this stakeholder group in their mission, thus acknowledging employees as instrumental to the achievement of organization strategic goals. Alavi and Karami (2009) states that there are two principal benefits of having a mission alignment ,first is the better staff motivation towards achieving a common organizational purpose, or sense of mission and second is a more focused/improved allocation of organizational resources. Hall (2002) presents that employee performance is based on the critical knowledge and learning within an organization. To be measured core competencies and skills needed to deliver products and services at high level of quality must be identified by the organizational mission and policies. Employee performance is also recognizes that the real value added to an organization is the employee's ability to use knowledge to solve problems related to delivery of services and products to the customer. Aligning the organizational mission will help the management to improve their performance as by revisiting the policies related to employees. This will help them in better way to overcome their weaknesses and perform according to the organizational needs and requirements (Hall, 2002). Bart and Bontis (2003) suggest that employees and their boards appear to be relatively aware of their organization's mission. Only a small percentage of employees indicated that there was "somewhat aware" of the mission and very few stated that there was no awareness at all. Nevertheless, for the most part, there were still a large number of employees who were not highly or fully aware of their Organization's mission. Employees "know, understand and remember the mission "this is an important and significant contributor to having individuals throughout the organization commit to it. The more aware the employees are of their organization's mission, the greater their organizational members commitment to it will be. Moreover, employee's awareness of the mission is equivalent in in terms of both management's awareness of the mission and management's involvement with the mission's development.

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