Th e balance between work and family plays a pivotal but evolving role in human resource policy. Ensuring that human resource policy responds to rapidly changing American family demographics, particularly the recent sharp increase in single unmarried Americans, is a major challenge. Compensation policy long has focused on family-oriented values by promising increased capacity to provide for a family in exchange for higher work performance. Now, employees are voicing concerns about matters such as quality time with family, and, in turn, employers are responding by implementing more benefi ts to achieve a better work-family balance. Strong counterarguments against human resource goals targeted only at families advocate personal policies that emphasize work-life balance for all employees. How well has personal policy kept pace with the shifting compensation preferences of public employees? Results suggest that implementation policies are keeping pace with employee satisfaction. However, levels of employee satisfaction often diff er widely by demographic characteristics.

Purpose Based on motivation theories, such as self-determination theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine whether intrinsic and extrinsic motivations significantly influence burnout and turnover intention in the public sector. Furthermore, the authors assessed the mediating effect of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and public service motivation (PSM) on the relationship between intrinsic/extrinsic motivation and burnout/turnover intention. Design/methodology/approach Based on a survey of 203 public employees from local governments in South Korea, this study conducted ordinary least squares regression analysis to investigate the relationships among intrinsic/extrinsic motivation, OCB, PSM, and burnout/turnover intention. Findings The authors found that intrinsic motivation had a significantly negative effect on both burnout and turnover intention. Extrinsic motivation had a significantly positive effect only on burnout. Lastly, OCB and PSM had a mediating effect on the relationships between intrinsic motivation and burnout. Originality/value These results provide some insights into the effects of job motivation on burnout and turnover intention in the public sector. Particularly, this research highlights the importance of intrinsic motivation, OCB, and PSM in decreasing burnout and the importance of intrinsic motivation in decreasing turnover intention of public employees.

This research examined the extent to which job motivation, social support, public service motivation (PSM), and burnout are related to turnover intention and whether burnout serves as a mediator for these relations. Using data collected from local revenue officers in South Korea, this research found that intrinsic motivation was significantly and negatively related to employees' intention to leave their organization, whereas self-sacrifice (one of the PSM elements) was positively associated with turnover intention. In addition, the analyses revealed mediating effects of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization (burnout) on both intrinsic motivation and selfsacrifice turnover intention. These findings are relevant for public organizations that are concerned about managing employee turnover intention caused by public reforms dealing with changing environment.

Can public sector organizations increase productivity through competition in spite of inherent limitations, such as budget constraints? Th is study addresses that question by examining the impact of four factors that contribute to employees' expectations regarding competitive work environments on organizational performance in terms of overall quality of work and client satisfaction. Th e four factors measured include rewards for merit such as salary and benefi ts, opportunities, organizational rules, and the capacity to deal with risks as perceived by employees. Using data on public and nonprofi t sector employees, expectations for merit rewards were positively related to employees' perception of organizational performance when the conditions of performance-based organizational rules and risk-taking behaviors were also satisfi ed. Moreover, employees' perceptions of organizational performance tended to increase when they felt that organizational rules were oriented toward performance plus organizational members and top leaders exhibited greater risk-taking behaviors. However, no correlation was evident between employees' expectations of opportunities and perceived organizational performance.

The development of earth‐abundant and efficient oxygen evolution reaction (OER) electrocatalysts is necessary for green hydrogen production. The preparation of efficient OER electrocatalysts requires both the adsorption sites and charge transfer on the catalyst surface to be suitably engineered. Herein, the design of an electrocatalyst is reported with significantly enhanced water oxidation performance via dual‐phase engineering, which displays a high number of adsorption sites and facile charge transfer. More importantly, a simple chemical etching process enables the formation of a highly metallic transition boride phase in conjunction with the transition metal hydroxide phase with abundant adsorption sites available for the intermediates formed in the OER. In addition, computational simulations are carried out to demonstrate the water oxidation mechanism and the real active sites in this engineered material. This research provides a new material design strategy for the preparation of high‐performance OER electrocatalysts.

The present study comprehensively examined how human resources (HR) directors in six U.S. state governments with drastic levels of civil service reform assess their states' pay-for-performance effectiveness in terms of the performance appraisal justice. It was found that the effectiveness of pay-for-performance is influenced by perceived fairness of performance appraisal. More specifically, this study found that perceived politicization of performance appraisal was negatively and significantly associated with pay-for-performance effectiveness. This study also found that perceived fairness of appraisal criteria was positively and significantly associated with pay-for-performance effectiveness. In addition, this study shows that the effectiveness of pay-for-performance may be affected by some demographic characteristics (e.g., age and gender) and state differences. In particular, drastic levels of civil service reform significantly and positively influenced the effectiveness of pay-for-performance, but insignificantly affected performance appraisal fairness. These results provide scholars and practitioners in the public sector with meaningful strategies for civil service reform.

We compared the feasibility of ultrasound (US)-guided myofascial trigger point (MTrP) injection with that of a blind injection technique following the use of shear wave elastography (SWE) for the measurement of stiffness at the MTrPs in patients with trapezius myofascial pain syndrome (MPS). A total of 41 patients (n = 41) were randomized to either the trial group (n = 21, SWE combined with US-guided injection) or the control group (n = 20, SWE combined with blind injection). At baseline and four weeks, they were evaluated for the manual muscle test (MMT), the range of motion (ROM), pain visual analogue scale (VAS) scores, Shoulder Pain and Disability Index (SPADI) scores and Neck Disability Index (NDI) scores during the abduction, adduction, flexion, extension, external rotation and internal rotation of the shoulder joint. Differences in changes in pain VAS scores, NDI scores and SPADI scores at four weeks from baseline between the two groups reached statistical significance (p = 0.003, 0.012, and 0.018, respectively). US-guided MTrP injection is a more useful modality as compared with a blind injection in patients with MPS.

No abstract