Exploring the Relationship between Mission Statements and Work-Life Practices in Organizations
研究金融服务业上市公司使命宣言与高质量工作生活实践的关系，发现重视员工价值的公司更可能获得相关认可，而强调股东价值的公司则相反。
Corporate mission statements are ubiquitous, but their relationship to organizational practices, especially those noted for their high quality, remains a subject of debate. We use the case of work—life practices in publicly traded financial services firms to illustrate an innovative method for studying this issue. Overall, we find variation in the mission statements of firms in the same organizational field. We also find relationships between these statements and high-quality investment in work—life practices, as recognized by Working Mother magazine and Kinder, Lydenberg, and Domini. The mission statements of firms recognized for their work—life initiatives were more likely than those of competitors to emphasize the value of employees and less likely to stress shareholder value. We identified four types of mission statements, a pattern which may reflect the dual influences of distinctive organizational commitments and pressure from institutional actors. We discuss the implications of our findings for the literatures on work—life initiatives, strategic implementation, and organizational theory.