Abstract:
Mission statement is the most important document of corporate communication and it should
be developed with relevant required components and able to read and understand by the
different stakeholders. Considering this premise, this research endeavor is aimed at evaluating
the mission statements of public quoted companies in Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE). The
entire population of the CSE is 298 companies, the sample selected through multi stage
sampling method, and it was consisted 78 companies. The mission statements were retrieved
from the respective websites, while the analysis was done under two stages. To test the richness
of the statement, it was applied the model developed by Pearce and David (1987) and David
(1989). To test the level of readability, the fog index was used. Analysis of statements for
richness proved that the sample firms in our study generally did not include needed components
in their mission statements. The most popular components the sample firms most often included
was Product and service, Philosophy and public image. Secondly it was recorded a very poor
readability index for mission statements of all the companies. This high score implies the need
to review and rewrite the mission statements by reducing sentence length and the use of
multiple-syllable words.
