Purpose -After two decades of research, the effect of a mission statement on an organization's performance is still unclear. In order to address these shortcomings, a research project via the setting-up of this paper seeks to identify all empirical studies addressing the mission statement-financial performance relation, analyze how the mission statement-financial performance relation is operationalized, and aggregate the findings of the identified studies by means of a meta-analysis. Design/methodology/approach -A systematic literature review procedure was developed to identify all relevant articles and meta-analytic procedures were used to calculate the effect size of the selected studies. Findings -The study results indicate a small positive relation between mission statements and measures of financial organizational performance. However, additional analyses indicated that interstudy differences in measures significantly influenced the estimates (population effect sizes of the created subsamples ranged from 0.0808 to 0.4100).Research limitations/implications -These contradictive findings stress the importance and impact of operationalization decisions in mission statement-performance research, and provide paths for future practice-oriented research. Originality/value -This study is the first to assess the performance impact of one of the most popular management instruments, namely mission statements, by means of meta-analytical techniques and, to evaluate the moderation effect of operationalization decisions on the cited relationship. Furthermore, by aggregating research on the mission statement-performance relationship, a knowledge base was devised which provides normative advice on the characteristics of a "good" mission statement.

Given the lack of insights into the micro-determinants of strategic planning (SP) in public organizations, this study uses information-processing theory and self-efficacy theory to investigate individual-level predictors of commitment to strategic plans among planning team members (PTMs). Specifically, we investigate whether plan commitment is contingent upon the fit between PTMs' preferred way of information-processing (i.e. their cognitive style) and the information-processing characteristics underlying SP processes in public organizations. Based on data gathered with 439 PTMs from 203 Flemish municipalities, we find that PTMs with a creating and planning style are committed to strategic plans because they deem SP useful.

This approach introduces idea mining as process of extracting new and useful ideas from unstructured text. We use an idea definition from technique philosophy and we focus on ideas that can be used to solve technological problems. The rationale for the idea mining approach is taken over from psychology and cognitive science and follows how persons create ideas. To realize the processing, we use methods from text mining and text classification (tokenization, term filtering methods, Euclidean distance measure etc.) and combine them with a new heuristic measure for mining ideas. As a result, the idea mining approach extracts automatically new and useful ideas from an user given text. We present these problem solution ideas in a comprehensible way to support users in problem solving. This approach is evaluated with patent data and it is realized as a web-based application, named 'Technological Idea Miner' that can be used for further testing and evaluation

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