Gamification in Human Resource Management
Emerging Research and Trends in Gamification
Introduction
Game-thinking is expanding into non-game contexts.
Game-thinking encompasses:
Gamification.
Serious games.
Game-inspired design.
Play, used to solve problems (Marczewski, 2014).
Definitions
Gamification: Using game elements in non-game contexts (Deterding, Sicart, Nacke, O’Hara, & Dixon, 2011).
Serious Games: Games with a primary goal other than entertainment (Michael & Chen, 2005).
Predictions and Importance
Gartner Inc. predicted:
By 2014, 70% of Global 2000 organizations would have at least one gamified application.
By 2014, 80% of gamified applications would fail (Gartner Inc., 2012).
Given the rising trend and potential business impact, research on game-thinking in organizational contexts is crucial.
Applications
Gamification is used in marketing (Sarner, 2013) and sales (Chapman, 2014).
Example: Online ads with simple games (clicking targets) to promote content.
Sales teams use points and leaderboards to inspire competition (Bunchball, 2013).
Serious games and game elements can be used in organizational support settings, like Human Resource Management (HRM; DuVernet & Popp, 2014).
HRM and Gamification
Reports identify gamification as a top trend in HRM (Munson, 2013; Society for Human Resource Management, 2014).
Research has been appearing at professional conferences (Landers, 2013; Bauer, Callan, Cavanaugh & Landers, 2014; Callan, Bauer, Armstrong, & Landers, 2014; Chow & Chapman, 2014; Geimer & O’Shea, 2014; Kubisiak, Stewart, Thornbury, & Moye, 2014; Popp, 2014; Sydell & Brodbeck, 2014).
Chapter Focus
Explore opportunities for gamification and serious games in HRM based on literature.
Identify future research areas at the intersection of game-thinking and HRM.
Apply prevailing HRM theories to game-thinking in HRM sub-fields.
Empirical Research
Current empirical literature on gamification is sparse (Hamari, Koivisto, & Sarsa, 2014).
Case studies of organizations using serious games and game elements will be discussed where empirical studies are absent.
Game Elements
Identify which game elements can be applied to non-game contexts, individually or in combination.
Bedwell, Pavlas, Heyne, Lazzara, and Salas (2012) developed a taxonomy of game elements used in learning contexts, incorporating larger taxonomies (Wilson et al., 2009).
Elements can be applied to gamified contexts broadly to improve HRM outcomes.
Game elements identified by Bedwell et al.:
Action language.
Assessment.
Conflict/challenge.
Control.
Environment.
Game fiction.
Human interaction.
Immersion.
Rules/goals.
HRM Areas Explored
Recruitment.
Selection.
Training.
Performance management.
Recruitment
Definition
Recruitment is defined as “those organizational activities that (1) influence the number and/or types of applicants who apply for a position and/or (2) affect whether a job offer is accepted” (Breaugh, 1992, p. 4).
Game-Thinking Applications
Serious games can portray aspects of the recruiting organization to potential applicants.
These games can immerse applicants within the organization and persuade them to apply or accept a job offer.
Gamification of Applicant Fit
Serious games and gamified applications can help job applicants determine their person-organization fit (Cable & Judge, 1996; Kristof, 1996; O’Reilly, Chatman, & Caldwell, 1991).
Enhance person-organization fit by applying the attraction-selection-attrition framework (Schneider, 1987).
Individuals are attracted to organizations with similar beliefs, personalities, and behaviors.
Recruiters are attracted to recruits similar to people within their organization.
Gamified applications and recruiting techniques can enhance organizational attractiveness.
Example: Deloitte China used game elements to enhance attractiveness during recruiting (Ordioni, 2013).
Virtual rendering of offices in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.
Virtual tour using immersion, environment, and control.
Job seekers explored different aspects of jobs.
Challenge element: finding “Green Dots” representing benefits and opportunities.
The Deloitte China Virtual Tour campaign has received over 32,000 visitors since its inception (Deloitte, 2014).
Potential Negative Consequences
Organizations might enhance their attractiveness to such an extent that potential applicants are misinformed about the true nature of the organization.
A serious recruiting game might demonstrate that an organization is environmentally conscious when in reality it is not.
The employee might leave the organization to which he or she is no longer attracted in order to join a more attractive one (Hamori, 2010; Darnold & Rynes, 2013).
Realistic Job Preview
Enhance person-organization fit by providing a realistic job preview (Wanous, 1973) within a serious game.
Example: America’s Army (2014), a game developed by the U.S. Army to recruit young Americans.
Previews the more exciting aspects of the soldier experience.
Demonstrates Army career opportunities and benefits.
Gameplay skills represent real-life social skills, inviting a more qualified applicant pool.
Gamification of the Recruitment Process
Enhance the recruitment process itself through game-thinking.
Making recruitment processes more game-like can motivate employees to recruit new applicants.
Objectives are accomplished through gamified employee referral systems and competitions among potential applicants.
Gamified Employee Referral Systems
Software developer Herd Wisdom created a mobile application to gamify the employee referral system.
Award points and prizes to employees for recruiting new applicants (Herd Wisdom, 2013).
Points are earned for behaviors like updating a user profile and sharing job postings.
Earning points increases employees’ chances of winning giveaway contests within the recruiting company.
Recruitment Through Competition
The recruitment process can be gamified through the use of competition.
Competitions can include elements of challenge or conflict, as well as human interaction when players are competing against other people.
Example: U.S. Department of Homeland Security hosted a competition for high school student computer hackers to meet its estimated computer security employee needs (Perlroth, 2013).
Competition was designed to excite young hackers about working in the government sector, hopefully for the Department of Homeland Security.
The competition was divided into stages, allowing the best participants to progress through each stage, concluding with prize money for the top contenders.
Live-updating leaderboards tracked participant points earned for tasks such as cracking passwords and flagging security vulnerabilities.
Over 700 high school students participated in the earliest stage of the competition, and the 40 highest-scoring students progressed to more advanced stages, which also involved increasingly realistic government computer security issues.
Future Research
Examine how different serious games and game elements can increase or decrease organizational attractiveness.
Research should examine the interaction between the individual differences of potential applicants (e.g. attitudes toward challenges/conflicts) and game elements used in recruiting.
Future research also should explore how serious games and game elements can portray truthful or false representations of recruiting organizations.
The effectiveness of gamified recruitment processes should be examined and evaluated.
Further, different operationalizations of the same element might have different effects on employee recruitment.
Research should also investigate whether gamified recruitment is more or less effective than traditional recruiting methods.
Models of gamified recruitment should be developed and tested.
Chow and Chapman (2013) examined the effects of gamification on recruit attitudes and affect toward organizations.
The model proposed that affect and attitudes influenced overall attitudes toward the recruiting organization over time, which then influenced applicant attraction to the organization.
Other models of gamified recruitment should consider person-organization fit in its various forms (Kristof, 1996) and how to maximize these outcomes with serious games and game elements.
Selection
Current Research
Selection research has traditionally focused on:
the validity of selection predictors and methods
finding a balance between adversely impacting protected classes (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 1978)
effectively predicting job performance while maintaining positive reactions to the selection process itself.
Game-thinking can impact all three of these areas by adding game elements, fairness perceptions of selection assessments might be generally improved over traditional methods
Serious games and gamified assessments might provide new insight into the prediction of job performance.
Gamification of Applicant Reactions to Selection
Applicants who perceive selection systems as unfair react negatively to those systems; application processes that are perceived as unfair can result in increased test anxiety and decreased test motivation (Hausknect, Day & Thomas, 2004), possibly skewing the results of assessments used in selection.
The perceptions of unfair selection systems are described by organizational justice theory.
This theory states that the distribution of rewards (distributive justice, e.g., which of the applicants received a job offer) and the procedures by which that distribution occurred (procedural justice, e.g., how job offers to applicants were determined) drive the overall fairness perceptions of applicants.
When fairness perceptions are poor, a variety of negative selection-related outcomes for the organization are more probable, including decreased applicant self-efficacy and self-esteem, decreased organizational attractiveness, decreased job offer acceptance, and eventually decreased job satisfaction, decreased performance, and increased turnover.
Applicant reactions to the use of new technologies in selection, including serious games and gamification, are driven by these perceptions; procedural justice perceptions mediate the relationship between technology usage and applicant reaction outcomes (Bauer et al., 2006; Weisheimer & Giordano, 2013).
Computer experience emerged as a key moderator of this relationship, revealing a stronger relationship between procedural justice perceptions and outcomes among those with greater experience with computers; people are more likely to react positively to the idea of gamification when they have previous gaming experience and positive attitudes toward serious games (Landers & Armstrong, in press).
Conversely, those with little or no experience with games may view the use of serious games in a high-stakes context as inherently unfair; even those with game experience may view the use of serious games and gamification in a high-stakes context like selection as unfair if the serious game or gamification is poorly designed or executed.
One example of this is Insanely Driven, an interactive selection game in which each job applicant is placed into a series of unusual situations and asked to make a variety of decisions.
At the conclusion of the game, a personality profile is produced based upon those responses; at a minimum, Insanely Driven is a highly memorable selection experience.
Gamification of Assessment
The ideal is that serious games or gamified assessments would improve the quality of information about job candidates obtained during the selection process.
For example, performance on a serious assessment game might be used to assess knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics of job candidates; serious games might be used to obtain higher quality data in one of two ways:
Serious game performance may be more difficult for test-takers to fake in an effort to maximize their chances to be hired.
Serious games may be better able to elicit behaviors than traditional questionnaire-based assessments.
Response Distortion
Response distortion on non-cognitive measures has long been a concern in the hiring process (Ones & Viswesvaran, 1998); when a test outcome is high-stakes, such as during the job application process, many test-takers distort their responses in a variety of intentional and unintentional ways.
Gamification of the assessment process may reduce the magnitude of both effects because desirable behaviors within the serious game may be less obvious to players; personality traits might be assessed indirectly via gameplay behaviors, such behaviors may be less susceptible to social desirability bias, and due to the ambiguous nature of their measurement, may also be more difficult for test-takers to manipulate purposefully.
Serious games may also elicit job-relevant behavior more readily than is possible with questionnaires.
Situational judgment tests (Landy, 2007), require test-takers to predict their future behavior rather than reflect upon their existing psychological traits and states; serious games as assessment tools may show similar benefits.
Consulting company PDRI employed a gamified simulation to assess candidates on learning agility, the willingness and ability to learn from experience, in addition to self-report measures (Kubisiak et al., 2014).
Test Validity
Minimization of negative reactions and maximization of beneficial psychometric properties is needed for legal defensibility and maximum utility; this is best ensured through the processes described by the various seminal documents on test validation, including those produced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (1978), the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (2003)
Specifically, tests must be reliable, valid, and fair; reliable tests show high consistency of measurement, and reliability is necessary to establish validity.
Tests must also be valid, measuring only the constructs it is intended to measure and predicting job performance adequately; if the test scores do not predict job performance and do correlate with protected class membership, there is a high risk of litigation.
A common concern in the legal systems of many countries is adverse impact, the unintentional discrimination against members of groups within protected classes.
Of particular concern in serious assessment games is the use of first-person shooters, in which males on average have greater interest and experience than females (Jansz & Tanis, 2007); if such a game were used in the selection process, it is probable that female applicants would perform more poorly on those games due not to lower standing on target individual constructs, but instead due to less game experience.
Future Research
The gamification of applicant reactions, that is, the use of game elements to improve reactions, has been explored somewhat, but this research is not typically called “gamification”.
In the study of situational judgment tests, branching has been used to provide later question prompts in direct response to applicant responses to earlier question prompts (Lievens, Peeters, & Schollaert, 2007); Future research in the gamification of reactions must consider which game elements are likely to elicit which effects on reactions, isolating these effects, and measuring them carefully.
Current research on the use of complete, developed serious games in selection is in its infancy.Future research should target each of the major psychometric properties of serious games and the game development process necessary to establish this; a research program should entail investigations of reliability, validity, and fairness.
First, the reliability of scores obtained from serious games must be established; this indicates a need for both over-time examinations of scores obtained from video games and within-game examinations.
Second, the validity of scores obtained from serious games must be established; no documented design process is in place to ensure that a developed serious game actually measures what it is intended to measure, which makes this a high priority for future research.
Third, the adverse impact of scores obtained from serious games must be investigated; it is unknown if these preferences and varying experience levels with various game types affect the success of serious games in providing accurate measurement, making this a high priority for future research as well.
Training
Current Research
The study of serious games in learning contexts has existed for several decades (see, e.g., Malone, 1981); in the field of training, game-thinking has been applied to both improving overall training effectiveness and to improving motivation during training.
Game-thinking in training can have an impact on learning and organizational outcomes, and can serve as a motivational tool, increasing training completion rates and trainee motivation to learn.
Gamification of Training Effectiveness
Those attempting to gamify training effectiveness intend to improve trainee reactions to learning, knowledge and skill increases, behavioral change, and organizational return (Kirkpatrick, 1976).
A major drive of the difficulties defining games or what makes them successful stems from the extreme complexity surrounding game design, which can involve thousands of people, from graphic designers, writers, and level designers through a variety of directors, managers, and producers (Schell, 2008).
Bedwell and colleagues (2012) developed a taxonomy of game elements used in learning contexts; although this is not an exhaustive list of game elements, it is an exhaustive list of game elements typically used to influence learning, making it a prime starting point to understand what about games can improve training effectiveness.
Gamification of Training Motivation
The gamification of training motivation is intended to improve completion rates and trainee motivation to learn rather than to actually deliver instruction.
These additions required no additional monetary expenses, although they did require somewhat more planning time; Landers, Bauer, Callan, and Armstrong (2015) comprehensively reviewed psychological theories of motivation to identify which theories were most promising to describe the effects of gamifying training motivation:
the theory of gamified learning
classic learning theories
expectancy theory
goal-setting theory
self-determination theory.
The Theory of Gamified Learning (Landers, 2014)
The only psychological theory focusing upon gamified learning, and targeted at gamification efforts where individual game elements are extracted and applied to support learning.
Proposes that game elements affect training outcomes through one or two mechanisms:
Gamification may be used to influence a mediating behavior or attitude, which is in turn theorized to affect learning; for example, in Landers and Landers’ (2014) empirical test of this theory, a leaderboard was used to increase the amount of time learners spent engaging with a project, and that amount of time in turn increased learning outcomes.
Gamification may be used to strengthen the relationship between instructional design and learning outcomes; for example, game fiction might be used to increase learner engagement, which should make existing course material more effective in increasing training outcomes.
Critically, in both of these approaches, gamification is not intended to itself teach the learner anything; instead, it is used to support existing instructional material.
Skinner's Classic Learning Theories
The classic learning theories of Skinner (1948) related to operant conditioning, where consequences are used to shape behavior.
When a stimulus event occurs followed by a behavioral response, subsequent consequences will alter the frequency of the behavioral response in the future; when the consequences are desirable, they are referred to as rewards, whereas when the consequences are undesirable, they are referred to as punishments.
In the context of gamification, rewards are far more common than punishments; recognition of accomplishments, such as using leaderboards, points, or badges, is used to reward target behaviors (Anderson, Huttenlocher, Kleinberg, & Leskovec, 2013; Denny, 2013; Fitz-Walter, Tjondronegoro, & Wyeth, 2011).
Vroom's Expectancy Theory (1964)
Vroom’s (1964) expectancy theory, which describes motivation as:
Expectancy: The belief that behavior will lead to an outcome.
Instrumentality: The belief that the outcome will lead to an event of value.
Valence: The amount of value of that final event.
For example, if scoring highly on a leaderboard is not a valuable accomplishment to a learner, its low valence is unlikely to trigger the learner to alter their behavior; Deloitte gamified an online executive training program by including rewards, rankings, and leaderboards to increase the valence of the training program (Badgeville, 2014).
Locke’s Goal-Setting Theory (1968)
Locke’s (1968) goal-setting theory, which describes motivation as the iterative process of reducing the discrepancy between a person’s goals and their actual behaviors, a process called self-regulation.
When gamification is used to set goals for learners, the learners are motivated to reduce the discrepancy between the goals set for them and their actual behavior, although this varies among learners based upon their goal commitment.
a great deal of guidance on what type of goals might be embedded within game-based learning to maximize learner motivation to achieve them such as:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Realistic
Time-Bound
Deci & Ryan's Self-Determination Theory (1985)
Deci and Ryan’s (1985; 2000) self-determination theory, which characterizes motivation as driven by both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards.
Intrinsic motivation is characterized by the satisfaction of a person’s needs to be competent, autonomous, and to feel related to those around them; Without intrinsic or extrinsic motivators, a person is said to be amotivated.
Intrinsic motivation is considered by many to be the theoretical cornerstone of engaging people through games and gamification (Malone, 1981; Ryan, Rigby, & Przybylski, 2006; Przybylski, Rigby & Ryan, 2010; Aparicio, Gutiérrez Vela, González Sánchez, & Isla Montes, 2012; Gears & Braun, 2013), although gamification is often associated more strongly with extrinsic motivation.
Future Research
Game based research is beginning to turn away from the case study approach toward an approach more consistent with modern social scientific methods (Bedwell et al., 2012); a training designer might randomly assign half of his or her trainees to experience game fiction in their training program and the other half to experience that training program in its original unmodified format, creating a casual link between game fiction and differences in outcomes in a group.
Future research might also consider models that consider the impact of technology explicitly (e.g., TETEM, Landers & Callan, 2012; Landers & Armstrong, in press) and the impact of game elements in a variety of learning contexts and based upon a variety of learning theories.
Research should specifically explore motivational theories of learning involving game-thinking (e.g., theory of gamified learning, Landers, 2014; Landers & Landers, 2014); future research is particularly relevant, as the optimal balance between intrinsic motivators and external incentives has not yet been identified.
Performance Management
Current Research
Job performance is determined by a number of factors including individual ability and motivation to perform; game-thinking provides a set of tools that can be utilized in order to enhance the motivational component of job performance, to bring employee be- haviors more in alignment with the expectations of the organization.
Campbell, McCloy, Oppler, & Sager’s (1993) Job Performance model posits that declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, and motivation are all antecedents of task performance, contextual performance, and adaptive performance:
Motivation consists of three multiplied components of choice: the choice to exert effort or not, the level of effort to exert, and the persistence of exerted effort; similar to the broader theory, the three components of motivation are multiplicative, that is, a change in any of these decisions would result in a change to her overall motivation.
Gamification of Motivation to Perform
Expectancy theory can be used to demonstrate how serious game behaviors will lead to desirable performance outcomes, how those outcomes will be rewarded, and how valuable those rewards are to the employee.
Goal-setting theory states that goals help individuals direct their efforts, increase the persistence of those efforts, and act as a catalyst for strategic thinking (Locke, Shaw, Saari, & Latham, 1981; Locke & Latham, 2002); effective gamification can help create optimal conditions for goal-setting by outlining specific goals and providing quick, accurate feedback.
Because many working-age Americans choose to play video games in their free time, gamified work tasks may be intrinsically motivating to a large portion of employees; however, because a sense of autonomy is important to motivation, employees desiring to continue performing their job without the inclusion of game elements should be allowed to do so without consequence.
Future Research
Future research should focus on how real work performance can be gamified, making it more motivating to employees while still accomplishing workplace objectives; these game elements should be manipulated to determine which elements are most effective at motivating job performance and information can be used to improve productivity via gamified performance.
Additional research on the demographic information such as, which demographics are likely to benefit from specific features, industries, organizations, and employees; also focus on avoiding unwanted behaviors.
Conclusion
First, empirical research should be directed towards the following question, “Does gamification work?” rather than, “Why or how does gamification work?”; Models of game-thinking effectiveness still require further testing in order to determine the antecedents of motivating serious games and game elements.
Points, leaderboards, and badges do not necessarily improve metrics, engagement, or efficiency (Hamari, 2013; Montola, Nummenmaa, Lucero, Boberg, & Korhonen, 2009); Research on game-thinking should focus on the extraction and application of individual game elements and combinations of game elements in non-game contexts, and Future research of game-thinking within each major area of HRM is necessary for the successful progression of its application.
Unrealistic expectations of serious workplace games may prevent effective applications from being adopted; also, Poor trainee attitudes and lack of previous experience with games might hinder their receptivity to game-based training (Landers & Armstrong, in press).