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Federal agency productivity and employee satisfaction are demanding goals even in the best of times. And one would not have to look far to come to the conclusion that the US government is not in the best of times. The Internal Revenue Service is accused of targeting conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status, the National Security Agency has been charged with monitoring social media outlets, and the US Department of Defense is yet again under fire for sexual misconduct of uniformed services members. After years of success in various organizations in Europe and abroad, the action learning approach ultimately was introduced to the federal government by then American University professor Robert Kramer. By instilling the core concepts of action learning into their agencies, federal leaders will find themselves well positioned for success when the games begin. Adapted from the source document.

1. The bureaucratic landscape : origin and implications for the federal leader / Patrick S. Malone -- 2. Federal administrative leadership in the American political system / Robert F. Durant -- 3. Theory and practice in federal government executive branch leadership and administration : developing rigorous approaches to effective government / Bill Valdez -- 4. Leadership and management : the use of distributed power and influence in a changing federal government / Andrew Rahaman -- 5. Leadership development : an investment necessary to increase federal employee engagement and federal government productivity / Robert M. Tobias -- 6. Administering and leading in the federal government : the need for an adaptive leadership approach for 21st-century leaders / Ruth Zaplin and Bill Valdez -- 7. Leading with integrity / Donald G. Zauderer -- 8. Communicating to drive engagement and trust / Angelo Ioffreda -- 9. A review of federal government reform initiatives since the passage of the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 / Nancy Kingsbury -- 10. Change management in federal government organizations / Ruth S. Wagner -- 11. Leading in the context of constitutional government / Joseph V. Kaplan -- 12. Understanding the federal budget : where policy meets money / Neile L. Miller -- 13. Emerging challenges for federal government leaders.

Background: Individuals who are less invested in their bodies, experiencing symptoms of depression, and consuming alcohol are at increased risk for engaging in suicidal behaviors. Aims: This study examined the relationships among three risk factors – body investment, depression, and alcohol use – and suicide proneness as measured by the Life Attitudes Schedule – Short Form (LAS-SF) in college students (N = 318). Methods: Path analysis was used to construct a causal model of suicide proneness. The Body Investment Scale (BIS) subscales were assumed to be causally prior to depression, which was in turn modeled as occurring prior to alcohol use, which was in turn modeled as prior to suicide proneness. Results: As expected, suicide proneness was positively predicted by alcohol use, alcohol use was positively predicted by depression, and depression was negatively predicted by the body image component of the BIS. Additionally, the body image-suicide proneness link was significantly mediated by depression and its direct effect on suicide proneness as well as by the two-mediator path of body image on depression on drinking on suicide proneness. Conclusions: Implications are offered for the improved identification and treatment of young adults at risk for suicidal and health-diminishing behaviors.

This study examined childhood and adolescent risk factors for males' reports of getting someone pregnant during adolescence. These questions were examined in an urban sample of 335 African American males involved in a prospective, longitudinal study. Childhood aggression significantly predicted reported pregnancies during adolescence. Boys who were stably aggressive across 3rd through 5th grades were at particularly high risk for reporting getting a female pregnant. Adolescent substance use and deviant peer involvement incrementally added to the prediction of pregnancy reports over and above the effects of childhood aggression. Adolescent aggressive problems did not contribute to reports of pregnancy once childhood aggression was accounted for in the model. These results highlight that precursors for males' pregnancy reports can be identified by as early as age 8. Findings also emphasize the importance of an expanded developmental focus to understand risk factors for adolescent pregnancy. The implications of these results are discussed for preventive interventions to reduce adolescent pregnancy.

We investigated the effects of parental warmth and behavioral control on externalizing and internalizing symptom trajectories from ages 8 to 14 in 1,298 adolescents from 12 cultural groups. We did not find that single universal trajectories characterized adolescent externalizing and internalizing symptoms across cultures, but instead found significant heterogeneity in starting points and rates of change in both externalizing and internalizing symptoms across cultures. Some similarities did emerge. Across many cultural groups, internalizing symptoms decreased from ages 8 to 10, and externalizing symptoms increased from ages 10 to 14. Parental warmth appears to function similarly in many cultures as a protective factor that prevents the onset and growth of adolescent externalizing and internalizing symptoms, whereas the effects of behavioral control vary from culture to culture.

We examined whether a policy banning corporal punishment enacted in Kenya in 2010 is associated with changes in Kenyan caregivers' use of corporal punishment and beliefs in its effectiveness and normativeness, and compared to caregivers in six countries without bans in the same period. Using a longitudinal study with six waves of panel data (2008–2016), mothers ( N = 1086) in Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Philippines, Thailand, and United States reported household use of corporal punishment and beliefs about its effectiveness and normativeness. Random intercept models and multi-group piecewise growth curve models indicated that the proportion of corporal punishment behaviors used by the Kenyan caregivers decreased post-ban at a significantly different rate compared to the caregivers in other countries in the same period. Beliefs of effectiveness of corporal punishment were declining among the caregivers in all sites, whereas the Kenyan mothers reported increasing perceptions of normativeness of corporal punishment post-ban, different from the other sites. While other contributing factors cannot be ruled out, our natural experiment suggests that corporal punishment decreased after a national ban, a shift that was not evident in sites without bans in the same period.

This study used data from 12 cultural groups in nine countries (China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States; N = 1,298) to understand the cross‐cultural generalizability of how parental warmth and control are bidirectionally related to externalizing and internalizing behaviors from childhood to early adolescence. Mothers, fathers, and children completed measures when children were ages 8–13. Multiple‐group autoregressive, cross‐lagged structural equation models revealed that child effects rather than parent effects may better characterize how warmth and control are related to child externalizing and internalizing behaviors over time, and that parent effects may be more characteristic of relations between parental warmth and control and child externalizing and internalizing behavior during childhood than early adolescence.