Influential Pathways of Employees’ Career Growth: Linkage of Psychological and Organizational Factors Based on Qualitative Comparative Analysis

Implementing the “hierarchical diagnosis and treatment” system highlights the important role of general practitioners as “residents’ health gatekeepers.” Still, the low level of career growth always limits the realization of their service value. Inertial thinking uses a single factor to explain the complexity of career growth in previous studies; in fact, it isn’t easy to assess whether the factor is a sufficient and necessary condition for a high level of career growth. Herein, we have used a set theory perspective to analyze the mechanism of influencing high-level career growth by combining psychological and organizational factors. This research aims to analyze causal complexity relationship between these conditions and results is analyzed in detail. We choose fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) with a sample of 407 GPs to test 5 antecedent conditional variables that can affect their career growth. The variables include professional identity, self-efficacy, achievement motivation, training mechanism, and incentive mechanism. To ensure the universality and diversity of data, the samples were selected from community medical institutions in different regions of China. The results show that three pathways can affect the high career growth of GPs, and the optimal pathway A2 is the linkage matching of high incentive mechanism, high professional identity, high achievement motivation, and high self-efficacy. At the same time, we find that professional identity plays an alternative role in the three pathways. When professional identity is at a high level, as long as achievement motivation and self-efficacy are superior, or achievement motivation, self-efficacy, and achievement motivation are superior, a high level of career growth can be achieved. We broke the shackles of previous studies that only focused on the impact of single factors on the career growth of GPs. From the perspective of set theory, we use configurational thinking to construct Influential pathways of high career growth of GPs by integrating antecedents. The results can provide effective support for improving GPs’ service ability and realizing their service value to protect residents’ health.

Estimation of the Rational Range of Ecological Compensation to Address Land Degradation in the Poverty Belt around Beijing and Tianjin, China

Ecological compensation provides innovative ecological solutions for addressing land degradation and guaranteeing the sustainable provision of essential ecosystem services. This study estimated the ecosystem service value and the opportunity cost of land use in the Poverty Belt of China—around Beijing and Tianjin—from 1980 to 2015 on the small watershed scale, and thereafter estimated the rational range of ecological compensation in this ecologically fragile zone. Results showed that the total ecosystem service value in the study area gradually decreased from CNY 54.198 billion in 1980 to CNY 53.912 billion in 2015. Moreover, the annual total ecological compensation of the whole study area ranged between CNY 2.67 billion and 2.83 billion. More specifically, areas with higher ecological compensation standards are mainly concentrated in the northwestern and northern parts of the study area, with a lower economic development level, while areas with lower ecological compensation standards are mainly located in areas with a relatively high level of economic development, e.g., the southern and southeastern parts of the study area. These results can provide valuable decision-support information for the design and optimization of ecological compensation to address land degradation along with rapid urbanization in the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region.