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This study aims to investigate the antecedents of the competitive pressure felt by individuals in organizations.

The data for this study are obtained from workers from multiple firms in various industries.

The results indicate that employees have a strong feeling of competitive anxiety and a sense of rivalry when their tasks are interdependent to one another, when they have a competition-oriented personality and when the relative evaluation scale is used for performance appraisal. The perceived proportion of performance pay only increased the sense of rivalry, while it did not increase the competitive anxiety. Also, intrinsic motivation and transformational leadership help mitigate both competitive anxiety and sense of rivalry.

The author recommends that managers utilize these factors to maintain an appropriate level of competition depending on their organizations' needs.

The original value of this study lies in its attempt to examine how competitive mindset is developed among interpersonal relationships in organizations.

The mechanism by which leadership influences organizational performance has largely been unexplained. This study intends to fill this gap. This study identified the six specific leadership practices: promoting inter-unit collaboration, managing diversity, providing performance feedback, ensuring goal directedness, developing employees, and resource provision. This study also identified a number of generic functions of leadership, that is, promoting cooperation, clarifying employees’ roles, and improving skills in organization. Then the mediating effects of the three generic functions were tested in order to link the specific leadership practices to organizational performance. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Structural equation modeling was used for analyzing the data from the 2014 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey to investigate the mediating model.

The effects of the six specific leadership practices on organizational performance were mediated by the three generic leadership functions.

The result of this study delineated the linking paths between leadership practices and organizational performance which has largely remained as a black box. Moreover, since the specific leadership practices are categorized by the generic functions that are instrumental for organizational performance, it provides theoretical and empirical grounds for managerial prescriptions for improving organizational performance.

Addressing low performers has been an important issue for government. The purpose of this paper is to examine what practices of performance management are effective in reducing the proportion of low performers in the US federal government.

The authors conducted the binary logit regression analysis and multinomial regression analysis.

Analyzing the Merit Principle Survey 2016, the authors found that the dismissal of low performing employees and the formal performance improvement plan (PIP) is the most effective in reducing the proportion of low performers. To the contrary, the within-grade-increase did not have a significant influence on the proportion of low performers. Moreover, using the performance appraisal for the purpose of reassigning employees to the position that better match employees’ talent increased the number of low performers in work units.

Research limitations are as follows. First, the performance measure for this study was the percentage of employees rated as unsuccessful. Second, the pseudo-R² indicated that the proposed model explained only the small, albeit significant, portion of the total variance in employee performance. Lastly, this study used a cross-sectional research design that may impede the validity of inference of causalities.

According to a recent news article (Rein, 2018), Trump signed an executive order that limits the stable benefits associated with government employment such as, limiting pay associated with union work and negotiating more stringent union contracts. These measures are largely aimed at eliminating low performing employees rather than attempting to improve their performances through carefully designed training programs. Although removing low performers may be an option, the results indicate that providing assistance in order to develop employee knowledge and skills through the PIP have a comparable impact on reducing low performers.

These findings imply that the use of performance evaluation for developmental or sanctioning purpose is more effective than reassignment or incentive purpose.

The concept of sustainable leadership is increasingly gaining popularity among organizational scholars. However, empirical evidences for the effectiveness of sustainable leadership are still lacking. This study investigated whether and how diverse elements of sustainable leadership influence the effectiveness of organization. Analyzing the large data collected from the employees of diverse U.S. federal agencies, this study found that sustainable leadership practices explained a significant variance of diverse aspects of organizational effectiveness. However, the different elements of sustainable leadership influenced the different aspects of organizational effectiveness to a different degree. The results showed that the relative strengths of the effects of each element of sustainable leadership differed across different aspects of organizational effectiveness. For example, promoting work/life balance was the most significant predictors of employee satisfaction, while its effect diminished when investigated against other aspects of organizational effectiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a novel electromagnetic-based acoustic energy harvester (EH) for the application of wireless autonomous sensors.

The developed acoustic EH comprises a Helmholtz resonator (HR), a suspension system that consists of a flexible membrane and a permanent magnet, a couple of coils and a coil holder. Furthermore, the HR, used in the harvester, is designed for a specific resonant frequency based on simulation carried out in COMSOL Multiphysics®.

The developed harvester is tested both in lab under harmonic sound pressure levels (SPLs) and in real environment under random SPLs. In lab, when exposed to 100 dB SPL, the harvester generated a peak power of 212 µW. Furthermore, in real environment in vicinity of electric generator, the harvester produced an output voltage of about 110 mV collectively from its both coils.

In this paper, a novel geometric configuration for electromagnetic-based acoustic EH is proposed. In the developed harvester, two coils are placed in it to achieve enhanced electrical output from it for the first time.