Uncovering nudges in gamification and their application in organizational change
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
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Date
2020
Department
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Mcode
Degree programme
Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management
Language
en
Pages
59+2
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Abstract
Under the threat of losing the market share, customers or even going bankrupt, companies nowadays are urged to adopt new technologies and implant innovations in order to stay up to date and make profits. Fast transition to the new routines and software, however, usually harms the core asset of or-ganizations – employees. The majority of humans does not love to leave the accustomed flow of life, including the workplace. Turbulence causes stress and more resistance in people, sometimes such circumstances can lead to serious problems with physical and mental health. Thus a lot of companies fail to introduce changes and upgrade the processes as they cannot persuade the employees to accept the new realities. The old-school stick and carrot policy does not do much good anymore, luckily, though, the research has advanced in the understanding of human motivation and behaviour, and the insights are easily applicable in the organizational context. In that way, the novel nudging concept drew the attention of the innovators. It stands for designing processes in a way that would lead to the desired behaviour in employees. Nudges are appreciated due to the fact that those who implement them do not always need to directly confront people whose behaviour needs to change. The concept utilizes humans’ psychology and thus, can be used behind the scene. For some, this may sound ma-nipulative, yet nudges are found to be efficient even when being fully transparent, hence there may not be any moral or legal dilemma about controlling people. The concept has already been applied in multiple business cases and still remains under investigations and improvement processes. While being efficient, nudging still has drawbacks: at some point, it can bore the participants of the process as it often takes a silent form or comes as written or verbal comments. It is hard, hence, to sustain employees’ interest in innovation or a change if it becomes a routine. At this point, the golden hour of gamification comes – by using game elements in non-gaming con-texts companies can engage their employees for longer periods and promote changes and innova-tions in a more pleasant and playful way. Some researchers name the approach to be a nudge as well. Gamification, indeed, has the core goal of changing the behaviour of people, whether it is corporate knowledge sharing, boosting the team spirit, helping employees with stress or else. I also believe that it is, in essence, the design of the process that yields right behaviour, yet there is a lot more to that. With this research, I aspired to uncover smaller nudges that are inherent in the design of gamified experiences and often overlooked by the professionals. My assumption is that recognizing the nudg-es, such as framing, reminders, the use of social norms, etc., top-management can develop more effi-cient and agile gamification solutions that would drive greater results. In order to demonstrate the presence of the (completely or partly) unintentionally architected paths in gamified processes, I re-viewed multiple articles and interviewed the experts that work with gamification internally and exter-nally to enhance the organizational change. The study unveiled that experts and scientists often over-look nudges in the gamified experiences they design. The findings raise an important discussion of efficiency and provides an avenue for better performing design of applied game elements.Description
Thesis advisor
Gartner, JohannesKeywords
gamification, nudges, organizational change, employee resistance