The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is a widely adopted standard for low power wireless personal area networks. It defines several medium access control layer functionalities including channel access, beacon management, guaranteed time slot management, etc. These issues are relatively straight forward in star topology, but the similar tasks pose several challenges in a peer-to-peer cluster tree network. Specifically, beacon synchronization and duty cycling schemes that are influenced by superframe parameters need to operate effectively as they serve as major energy saving avenues. The former that is part of beacon management process allows a device to synchronize its transmissions with a coordinator to facilitate better channel utilization. Further, duty-cycling allows devices to enter low-power mode by scheduling their sleep period. Lack of these schemes in the standard for cluster-tree networks has motivated research in this direction. However, all the related works have aimed to address the problem of duty-cycling and synchronization independently without considering the interdependencies between them. These dependencies arise due to the common superframe parameters. In this paper, we first analyze various works carried out to address beacon synchronization and duty-cycling issue in IEEE 802.15.4 networks. Later, we establish a co-relation between these two mechanisms and show how the former effects the later and vice-versa. The analytical and simulation results allow us to understand the existing schemes better and further assist in the design of aforementioned schemes to maximize energy savings.