Article Review 2

Article review 2

[Name of the Writer]

[Name of the Institution]

Article review 2

Strategic Planning is a crucial function of an organizations management and it helps in setting goals, objectives, and priorities. In order to make strategic planning effective, vision and mission statements are created. These play a vital role in setting objectives and providing a road map which everyone needs to follow. A vision statement of an organization answer the basic question, "What do we want to become?" A clear vision statement leads to an effective mission statement (David, & David, 2013). Considering the importance of vision statement, it is the first and foremost step in the strategic planning and they have always been considered as element of strategic management. This paper seeks to review an article by Jerry Allison that highlights the missing link of vision statements with strategic communication and organizational culture (Allison, 2017). The article extends the theory in concepts of strategic communication, management and organizational culture and employs a research practice that is free of researcher bias.

The article written by Jerry Allison highlights the impacts of the vision statement of an organization on relatively new and emerging concepts of strategic communication and organizational culture. The author does not ignore the concept of strategic management that has always been associated with vision and mission statements. The article spreads the influence a vision statement can hold for an organization and the ways it is linked with the other areas of management. The article progresses in three different steps, first it links vision statement with other disciplines, second, it adopts a new practice of text mining, and third, it develops a hierarchical classification of vision statements which serves to demonstrate the relationship of statements with each other. In addition, the author claims that the study will help future researchers to reduce visions statements to a form where these could easily be quantified for the purpose of research (Allison, 2017).

The strategic communication of an organization involves all the forms of communication taking place in an organization. Strategic communication is a new field and it is formed by the intersection of management and communication theory (Hallahan et al., 2007). In order to find the link between strategic communication and vision statement, the author uses the methodology of text mining and analyzed 789 vision statements of different organizations. Most of these organizations were based in the United States. The analysis resulted in two parent classes and seventeen subclasses of vision statements (Allison, 2017). Employing this methodology words used in the vision statements of organizations were examined. This taxonomy of vision statements gave several insights about the vision statements of organizations. It outlined that these statements are developed to frame each organization in the correct context. This confirmed that vision statement of an organization are an element of strategic communication that serve to explain the purpose of the existence of a firm. These statements are a kind of message that is communicated to all the stakeholders in order to maximize implementation. The hierarchical classification of vision statements established by the author not only proves its connection with strategic communication but also proposes how it links with organizational culture.

Organizational culture is an arrangement of common values and beliefs and acts as the guiding principle. The vision statement of an organization also acts as a guiding principle since it is a shared assumption of where the organization will be moving in the coming years and where it wants to be. This is the vision created at the time of formation of an organization. Studies recommend that management must create shared values at the time of the creation of the organization in order to build a culture that let the organization work towards its objectives. In this way, different vision statements can relate to different organizational culture.

The overall paper makes a great role in the literature of new management fields of organizational culture and strategic communication. The author has adopted a new methodology developing a hierarchical taxonomy of vision statements, founded on the wordings founds in statements. The taxonomy gives an overview of the links found between several vision statements. It will also assist future researchers in analyzing vision statements in a quantitative manner that was not a very familiar concept. Not only this, but this paper also associates vision statements with the organizational culture that has not been done earlier (Allison, 2017). Until now, the vision statement was merely a concept of strategic management but this research pushes that it serves a greater purpose. At the end of the paper, the author has succeeded in making a connection between vision, organizational culture, and strategic communication.

The taxonomy also helps to comprehend the vision statements from a different and a much simpler perspective. Secondly, it further permits different empirical studies by classifying visions statements and correlating them with other measurements such as the size of the organization. Previously the literature highlighted the significance of finding a link between strategy, culture, and structure. However, this study serves the purpose of defining the link between these three with the help of a strategic concept i.e. vision statement (Allison, 2017). The propositions made in the paper also extends the studies in fields of organizational culture employing vision of different organizations. One of the most useful information that was extracted from the analysis of this study that the firms generally do not create vision statements purposefully but copy the statements of other similar organizations in the industry. It has suggestions for the organizations that the kind of vision statement assumed and applied must bring into line with the organizational culture and strategy to enhance organizational effectiveness.

References

Allison, J. (2017). A vision statement taxonomy: linking strategic management, strategic communication, and organizational culture. Global Journal of Management and Marketing, 1(2), 1-19.

David, F. R., & David, F. R. (2013). Strategic management: Concepts and cases: A competitive advantage approach. Pearson.

Hallahan, K., Holtzhausen, D., Van Ruler, B., Verčič, D., & Sriramesh, K. (2007). Defining strategic communication. International journal of strategic communication, 1(1), 3-35.