The Value of Mission Statements in Public Agencies

Many public management scholars have argued that defining a strong mission for public agencies is a useful step toward performance improvement. Public managers and elected officials have begun widespread adoption of formal mission statements to do just that. However, remarkably little empirical research has examined the case for or against mission statements. We looked at the mission statements of 304 public schools, with data about school characteristics and performance before and after the adoption of the mission statement. We asked whether missions vary across agencies doing the same work, whether some mission statements have an impact on performance, and whether the impact is positive or negative. Although skeptics doubt that talking about organizational mission is constructive, our results suggest that missions do vary substantially and that the choices that managers make in the content and rhetorical style of their mission statements can have consequences that facilitate or impair subsequent performance.