Citizen advisory boards are important to non-profit and governmental organizations, yet these boards face fundamental problems of ambiguous responsibilities and limited board member commitment. In the present paper a model of these propositions is developed and tested. Board performance is operationalized as productivity and board impact, and is expected to be dependent on the development of operational objectives and a subcommittee structure, which in turn is facilitated by the financial support of management, and impeded by a large board membership. The model is tested using path analysis on a national sample of federally-mandated Community Advisory Boards to public television stations. We find that the establishment of operational objectives and subcommittees is significantly associated with productivity but only weakly with the impact of the advisory board. Board size is unassociated with board performance. The findings support the assertion that successful boards must clarify their roles and develop efficient operating structures, but suggest that the advisory board-management relationship is complex. Virtually all organizations have boards of outsiders who pass judgment on organizational policies. These judgments may be binding on the organization or they may be purely advisory. As pervasive as these structural features are we know surprisingly little about these boards. The present study is concerned with the performance of one kind of board-the advisory board. Advisory boards are composed of non-organizational members who meet intermittently to advise the organization's managers, with members almost always appointed or approved by these full-time managers. Advisory boards are particularly important to non-profit organizations, since they are frequently imposed on non-profits by those (especially government) providing funding. Advisory boards are assumed to provide a &dquo;public&dquo; check in return for public monies. However, uncertainty about what non-profit advisory boards can and should do is a frequent problem. There is confusion about who these boards' constituencies should be and about their roles in the organization. These confusions are exacerbated by the often limited commitment advisory board volunteers give to overcoming the barriers such uncertainty creates. Hence, board members and managers are frequently dissatisfied with advisory board performance (Sewell, Phillips and Phillips, 1979). The number of non-profit and government advisory boards grew explosively as a result of the federal citizen participation mandates of the 1960s. Fur