Dissertation

The Relationship Between Police Mission Statements and Measures of Organizational Effectiveness: An Exploratory Study

Holliday, Bradley Scott

2025

Overview

Organizational mission statements gained popularity in the 1980s and have since become ubiquitous in both public and private organizations. Much of the extant research on mission statements has been in the corporate and nonprofit contexts, leaving a gap in the public context. In particular, scholarly inquiry into police mission statements is scant. This study fills this gap by building a broad-scale database on contemporary police department mission statements, thereby creating baseline data for exploratory research. Content analysis of 110 police mission statements reveals ten distinct themes recurring across the sample. A customer-focused composite score is constructed to measure the extent to which each mission statement is written from a customer-oriented perspective. Leveraging propositions from Goal-Setting Theory (GST) and David et al.’s (2014) customer-focused Mission Statement Theory (MST), this study examines whether a link exists between the ten themes, the customer-focused composite score, and the desired measurable outcomes. Community and police satisfaction survey data, FBI UCR data, a safety index, and a quality-of-life index are used to measure outcome variables. Relative to the customer-focused composite score, findings from the bivariate and multivariate analyses show a positive association between the composite score and overall community satisfaction in the police, indicating support for both GST and MST. As goal specificity, in the form of the customer-focused composite score, increases so does the measure of expressed satisfaction in the police department. These findings suggest mission statements may be a useful tool for bolstering measured outcomes when they have a high composite score (i.e., include many customer-focused themes). Police executives might consider examining their mission statements for the presence of these key themes and whether they are linked to specific positive outcomes for the community. Results from other statistical models are mixed. Three themes are associated with intended outcomes in the expected manner, thereby supporting the corresponding hypotheses. Six themes are related to their outcomes in a manner counter to expectations. For example, crime rates are higher, on average, in those jurisdictions where the police express the goal of reducing crime in their mission statement. This study lays the groundwork for future studies on police mission statements and provides guidance for police executives as they consider the themes communicated in their department’s mission statement and how they are connected to their measured outcomes.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Community policing / Counterterrorism / Customer services / Law enforcement / Public policy / Terrorism
• ISBN: 9798297621794