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    Learning or Playing? The Effect of Gamified Training on Performance
    03 Apr 2019Working Paper Summaries

    Learning or Playing? The Effect of Gamified Training on Performance

    by Ryan W. Buell, Wei Cai, and Tatiana Sandino
    Games-based training is widely used to engage and motivate employees to learn, but research about its effectiveness has been scant. This study at a large professional services firm adopting a gamified training platform showed the training helps performance when employees are already highly engaged, and harms performance when they’re not.
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    Author Abstract

    Gamified training is a novel management control system in which companies use gamification techniques to engage and motivate employees to learn. This study empirically examines the performance consequences of gamified training by conducting a field experiment in a professional services firm. We find that the main effect of adopting the gamified training platform on performance is not statistically significant at conventional levels. However, we also find that the effect is moderated by employee engagement, such that the gamified training platform improved performance in offices with high employee engagement and worsened performance in offices with low employee engagement. In offices with high levels of employee engagement—with above-median rates of employee retention and willingness to log onto the training platform—each additional minute of average platform engagement per employee led to an additional 0.28 new clients per month. In offices with below-median rates of employee retention and willingness to log onto the training platform, each additional minute of average platform engagement per employee resulted in 0.78 fewer new clients per month. Taken together, these results suggest that gamified training, which, in part, is intended to help engage and motivate employees to learn, may only yield performance benefits among those who are already highly engaged and motivated.

    Paper Information

    • Full Working Paper Text
    • Working Paper Publication Date: March 2019
    • HBS Working Paper Number: HBS Working Paper #19-101
    • Faculty Unit(s): Technology and Operations Management
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    Ryan W. Buell
    Ryan W. Buell
    C. D. Spangler Professor of Business Administration
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    Tatiana Sandino
    Tatiana Sandino
    Arthur Lowes Dickinson Professor of Business Administration
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