Wal-Mart wants to “save people money.” Chevron aspires to “be the global energy company most admired for its people, partnerships and performance.” Microsoft’s mission statement says the company’s goal is to “help people and businesses realize their full potential.”
Donnalyn Pompper
In her most recent study, Donnalyn Pompper, associate professor of strategic communication at the Temple University School of Media and Communication, found that the most profitable companies at the top of the Fortune 500 list are balancing financial success with social responsibility better than companies at the bottom.
“It is fairly well-acknowledged that many corporations hesitate to ‘do the right thing’ when it comes to stakeholders [employees, customers, etc.] and the environment if doing so will detract from the bottom line,” Pompper said. “Our study findings suggest that the higher-performing Fortune 500 companies may have found a way to accomplish both aims — to be socially responsible and to turn a profit.”
Pompper, who co-authored the study with Taejin Jung, associate professor of communication studies at SUNY-Oswego, compared the mission statements of the top Fortune 500 companies like Wal-Mart and AT&T with the bottom-tier Fortune 500 companies, such as H&R Block and Electronic Arts.
“The top 20 higher-performing corporations’ mission statements more frequently mentioned non-financial objectives and concern for satisfying shareholders than the bottom 20 lower-performing corporations,” the professors wrote in their paper, “Assessing Instrumentality of Mission Statements and Social-Financial Performance Links: Corporate Social Responsibility as Context,” which was published this year in the International Journal of Strategic Communication.
Pompper and Jung said it’s important for these companies to work toward the goals in their mission statements in practical ways.
“Corporations with strong public image components in mission statements must periodically evaluate contribution of these image goals against genuine relationships with publics in order to achieve balance and to counterbalance negative perceptions of public relations as a green washing tool when it comes to [corporate social responsibility],” they wrote.
Pompper said the research can be used a catalyst to dive deeper into the relationship between financial success and social responsibility to determine if one causes the other: Do responsible companies earn more money, or does having more money give a company the ability to be more socially responsible?
“With these findings, we discovered that there may be a relationship between being profitable and mission statements,” Pompper said. “Being socially responsible may be a key; one that deserves deeper scrutiny.”
By Jeff Cronin
jcronin@temple.edu
215-204-3324