Gamification of task performance with leaderboards: A goal setting experiment - Landers et al. - 2015 - Article

What is this article about?

Gamification is becoming increasingly popular, and people are looking to see whether it can help to increase employee performance. For example, by directing and rewarding employee attention to tasks through goal setting, performance could be improved. There is however little research in this area. There are differences between traditional goal-setting efforts and gamification. In traditional settings, a single goal is set for an employee to achieve. It seems that ‘SMART’ (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound) goals are most motivating. In gamification, points and leaderboards are the goals. However, these are seen as non-optimal, because when there are only points given, there is no specific goal to pursue. A leaderboard presents many possible goals, and represents the prior performance of others. This means that both points and leaderboards lead to that employees have to set their own goals. In this paper, the authors analyze the effectiveness of goal-setting theory to explain changes in task performance resulting from a leaderboard intervention.

What about effects of gamifying with leaderboards?

It is difficult to conclude any effects of leaderboards based on previous studies. This is because leaderboards are experimentally isolated as a gamification technique. When the leaderboards are included in an experimental condition with other game elements such as badges or narrative, then the presence of these additional elements may interaction with leaderboards and  this may be leading to the observed differences.

What about goal-setting theory?

According to Locke (1968), people will be motivated to strive towards goals. This results from a process called self-regulation, and self-regulation is the mediator between set goals and performance. It is defined as: “the modification of thought, affect, and behaviour”. Goal-setting interventions are considered to be the most powerful motivational interventions. Leaderboards can perform similar to the classic goal-setting interventions, because leaderboards provide the user with several potential goals. Therefore, the authors expect that the leaderboard will be effective because it serves as a difficult goal. They hypothesize:

“The leaderboard will function similarly to a difficult goal. Specifically, participants in the leaderboard condition should outperform participants in an easy or do-your-best goal condition.”

What is the role of goal commitment in goal-setting theory?

Goal commitment is another moderator in the relationship between goals and performance. For those with high commitments, the linear relationship between goal difficulty and goal performance is observed. For those with low commitment, there is no relationship between the goal level and performance. People with lower goal commitment are more likely to reject difficult goals and replace them with easier goals. For people with high commitment, performance remains high, even under impossible goal conditions. This is probably because they continue to strive towards the impossible goals rather than revise their goals downward. The authors expect that goal commitment will function as a moderator of the leaderboard-performance relationship, just as it is a moderator of traditional goal setting. They hypothesize:

“Goal commitment moderates the relationship between the use of leaderboards and task performance. Specifically, greater goal commitment will strengthen the effect of more difficult goals and the leaderboard.”

What can be concluded?

The authors found that goal setting can be an effective theoretical framework to explain the success of leaderboards. However, gamification using leaderboards may be more effective for relatively simple tasks: a leaderboard tracking sales performance is likely to be more effective than a leaderboard tracking managerial success. Goal commitment also moderates the success of leaderboards as goal-setting theory would predict: if people do not believe a leaderboard provides worthwhile goals, then leaderboards will not be successful at altering employee behavior. If employees do not believe that the leaderboard is appropriate, it is also unlikely to affect performance. A third finding is that leaderboards are approximately as effective as difficult-to-impossible goals to increase task performance. When individuals are faced with a leaderboard, they are likely to target the top or near-top goals presented on that leaderboard, even when there are no specific instructions to target those goals. However, it remains unknown if the social component of leaderboards is more motivating than simple goal setting. Future research should examine the role of goal-setting theory to explain the success of leaderboards in applied contexts.