The work described herein demonstrates the exquisite control that the inner coordination sphere of metalloenzymes and transition-metal complexes can have on reactivity. We report one of few crystallographically characterized Mn-peroxo complexes and show that the tight correlations between metrical and spectroscopic parameters, established previously by our group for thiolate-ligated RS-Mn(III)-OOR complexes, can be extended to include an alkoxide-ligated RO-Mn(III)-OOR complex. We show that the alkoxide-ligated RO-Mn(III)-OOR complex is an order of magnitude more stable (t 1/2 298 K = 6730 s, k obs 298 K = 1.03 × 10 −4 s −1 ) than its thiolate-ligated RS-Mn(III)-OOR derivative (t 1/2 293 K = 249 s, k 1 293 K = 2.78 × 10 −3 s −1 ). Electronic structure calculations provide insight regarding these differences in stability. The highest occupied orbital of the thiolate-ligated derivative possesses significant sulfur character and πbackdonation from the thiolate competes with π-backdonation from the peroxo π*(O−O). DFT-calculated Mulliken charges show that the Mn ion Lewis acidity of alkoxide-ligated RO-Mn(III)-OOR (+0.451) is greater than that of thiolate-ligated RS-Mn(III)-OOR (+0.306), thereby facilitating π-backdonation from the antibonding peroxo π*(O−O) orbital and increasing its stability. This helps to explain why the photosynthetic oxygen-evolving Mn complex, which catalyzes O−O bond formation as opposed to cleavage, incorporates O-and/or N-ligands as opposed to cys S-ligands.