Impact of gamification on employee motivation in situations of change in medium-size organisations in the United Kingdom.

Sammanfattning: This thesis tries to provide a comparative study and complimentary data analysis into the effectiveness of game design patterns such as LEGO Serious Play, Leaderboards and Collective voting in terms of the impact that gamification has in change management framework. The study is looking at how gamification impacts employees from a motivational and engagement, in change management tasks, perspective. In a first instance, the researcher/author references and reviews key theories such as theory of fun for game design, motivational theory and change theory. Furthermore, a literature search/review for those theories has taken place to identify what the current scientific base has captured around gamification impact in engagement, motivation and performance of individuals and all potential limitations as well. This led to a clear and specific existing baseline framework. At a later stage, researcher/author describes the research strategy and methodology used to apply three specific gamification techniques to a real organisation (participants – n=20) which delivers change and is going through a transformation process. This included two different data collection methods; semi-structured interviews with organisation’s employees and participant observations within the organisation’s headquarters offices. The participant observation data collection compliments the interviews’ one, which acted as the primary method. The study examines the impact the gamification techniques had on the organisation’s employees while they deliver change daily, their interactions within sessions and meetings, decision making events and other. Findings, through the thematic analysis process, include the participants’ feedback on their overall experience, reward and joyfulness when use gamification. Results show that gamification tools and techniques compliment positively employees within the change management framework, increasing the enjoyment of participation in change activities without increasing competitiveness and also enables more effective decision making. It is important to highlight that creativity seems that is increased as well, through gamification application. It is hoped that knowledge and understanding of the impact of gamification techniques in change management framework could be found useful in an industry related environment and the results of this study could be extended to other areas as well.