On the influences of personality traits on employees engagement with gamified enterprise tools

Abstract

Gamification techniques are used in enterprises to support employees' engagement with computer-mediated business processes. The potential effectiveness of the incentives brought by gamification techniques are, however, not equally appealing to individuals. To better understand when gamification can be an effective engagement aid, it is important to study how individual differences (personal or character-related) of employees relate with the effectiveness of game mechanics applied to enterprise-class computer tools. Personality is a property of an individual that is known to influence, among others, task performance, learning styles, and gaming preferences. Despite the existence of an abundant body of research, the relationship between the effectiveness of game mechanics in an enterprise setting and the personality of employees is yet to be fully understood. This thesis contributes new knowledge on the matter, by studying the influence of personality traits and gender stereotypes on the behavior of 177 IBM employees that participated in an experiment on gamified learning and social experience. We engaged with the employees of IBM Netherlands and performed a personality trait and gender stereotype inventory by means of a questionnaire. The results of the questionnaire supported our investigation on the descriptive power of personality traits in explaining the differences in participation and engagement in the targeted population. Finally, we validated the effectiveness of state-of-the-art techniques for automated personality assessment, to assess the possibility of developing large-scale experiments on the effect personality traits without the need for questionnaires.