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Nonprofit organizations have been known as mission-driven entities, in which people are attracted by their passion for the mission and remain there to accomplish it. This study tested the traditional assumption of mission orientation among nonprofit employees by replicating Brown and Yoshioka's research on the role of mission attachment as a factor in nonprofit employee retention. The results of the hierarchical regression analysis are generally consistent with Brown and Yoshioka: Human services employees showed a positive attitude toward the agency's mission, but dissatisfaction with working conditions—pay and career advancement—overrode the role of mission attachment in employee retention. However, employees' positive perceptions and strong correlations between nonprofit working conditions and mission attachment suggest that mission can still play a significant role in retaining nonprofit employees by reducing dissatisfaction with pay and career advancement.

Prominent scholars have observed that public organizations and policies tend to have ambiguous goals, but research on these assertions is scarce. This analysis adds to a recent set of studies that developed measures of organizational goal ambiguity and found that federal agencies vary on these measures due to differences in funding patterns and other variables. This study adds variables representing the nature of the agencies' work—the routineness and complexity of their technologies and tasks. As hypothesized, complexity relates positively to one dimension of goal ambiguity, "directive goal ambiguity." Routineness of tasks relates negatively to "evaluative goal ambiguity," whereas complexity relates positively to it. These results further evince the value of the measures of goal ambiguity and their potential contribution to analysis of variations among government agencies, and to such issues as the applicability of various managerial reforms to different agencies. The results also contribute indicators of organizational task complexity and routineness that researchers can use to take into account the type of work that an agency does, in analyzing government agencies and differences among them.

This article investigates the effect of performance management and explores one factor—trust in one's supervisor—as a critical facilitator of it. Although improving performance is a prominent issue in public management and the term, performance management, is in heavy use in the public sector, systematic investigations on the subject are relatively rare. Defining performance management as a human resource management tool, this research empirically tests the associations between performance management and two outcomes: perceived work-unit performance and perceived agency performance. In addition, it examines the role of trust as a facilitator of the successful implementation of performance management. Using the Merit Principles Survey 2005, we test the ideas. Ordered logit regression analyses confirm that performance management promotes perceived performance of both work-unit and agency, and the leverages are further increased under a high level of trust in supervisors.

A number of qualitative studies have found that failure to accomplish missions can be attributed to competing accountability requirements. This article presents empirical evidence concerning the impact of competing accountability requirements on employees' perceived work performance. Specifically, this article has two objectives: (a) to identify different types of accountability requirements with quantitative data and (b) to determine to what extent the competing pressures of accountability affect individual employees' perceived work performance. The authors find that accountability is indeed a complex and multidimensional construct— compliance, professional, and political accountability—that imposes competing pressures on employees' perceptions of their work performance, which can reduce the probability of actual mission accomplishment in an agency.