stay in the organization (Barnard 1938).
To accomplish this, several public management scholars have suggested the importance of goal theory in understanding the motivational context of public organizations (Gibson andTeasley 1973; Perry and Porter 1982; Selden and Brewer 2000; Wright 2001, 2004). This suggestion is consistent with recent reviews of work motivation theories, which recommend that any model of work motivation should contain the underlying factors that explain how goals affect work motivation (Kanfer 1992; Katzell and Thompson 1990; Mitchell 1997). These factors fall into two categories: goal content and goal commitment. Goal content refers to the way that certain characteristics of goals or jobs, such as their difficulty and specificity, influence the goal-performance relationship by directing or energizing behavior. Alternatively, goal commitment refers to job attitudes that influence the persistence of goal-related behavior, focusing on whether the individual accepts the goal and is determined to reach it, even if confronted with setbacks or obstacles. Recent empirical work suggests these factors can help us to understand the potential impact of ambiguous, conflicting, and important organizational goals on employee performance (Selden and Brewer 2000; Wright 2004). Unfortunately, these studies provide only a partial test of goal theory's application in the public sector, either by focusing on goal content over goal commitment (Wright 2004) or failing to investigate the relationships between goal-related constructs (Selden and Brewer 2000).2 Although goal commitment is particularly salient to understanding the effects of organizational mission on public employee work motivation, a more comprehensive model of the influence of these factors is necessary. To that end, this study advances our understanding of work motivation in the public sector by using the conceptual framework of goal theory to investigate the effect of organizational mission valence on employee commitment to assigned performance objectives.
Performance-Goal Commitment
There is growing recognition of the importance of commitment in understanding employee performance (Denhardt, Denhardt, and Aristigueta 2002; Klein et al. 1999). Goal commitment depicts the extent to which an individual accepts a performance goal and is determined to reach it, even if confronted with setbacks or obstacles (Erez, Earley, and Hulin 1985). Although research has identified a wide variety of factors that may contribute to goal commitment, two conditions seem particularly important: Individuals are more committed to their performance objectives when they believe those objectives are achievable and will result in important outcomes for themselves or, to the extent they are committed to organizational goals, the organization in which they work. Together, these two conditions, represented in figure 1 by self-efficacy and job-goal importance, determine the degree to which individuals are committed to performing their work tasks, whereas other identified factors are more distal antecedents and only influence such commitment indirectly as a result of their effect on these conditions (Hollenbeck and Klein 1987; Klein 1991; Klein et al. 1999; Locke, Latham, and Erez 1988; Wofford, Goodwin, and Premack 1992). Therefore, an understanding of the motivational context requires a discussion of not only each of the conditions that directly influence goal commitment but also how the separate but related contributions of task and mission characteristics affect employee motivatio