Plug & Play? Stakeholders’ co-meaningmaking of gamification implementations in workplace learning environments

Abstract

This dissertation discusses the implementation process of gamification in organisations’ workplace learning environments, focusing on four stakeholder groups: Administrators, Leaders, Providers and Users. These stakeholder groups are represented across the dissertation’s five articles, which present the results of my investigation of the groups’ meaning attributions to the gamification implementations in their organisations’ learning environments. The empirical materials include assembled ethnographic records, surveys and event logs from the implemented technological artefacts in different settings. In the included studies, I focused on various sequences in gamification implementation. In Study I, I portrayed various design workshops by employing a participatory observation approach to amplify the voices of the Administrators and Providers. In Study II, I provided an account of a whole gamification implementation project using a design ethnography approach to give voice to the four stakeholder groups. In Study III, I utilised a mixed-methods approach, examining the Users’ notions and opinions of gamification implementation in their online corporate course. In Study IV, I identified and explained Users’, Administrators’ and Leaders’ miscellaneous gamification design preferences using a sequential mixed-methods approach. Through Study V’s blended research design, I displayed how a low level of technological maturity in an organisation undertaking gamification implementation raises concerns that threaten to jeopardise the entire project due to the unforeseen and spiked resource demand. Although the previously given design frameworks for gamification for learning have downplayed the positions of organisational stakeholders and the importance of the implementation procedure, the results of this dissertation indicate a circumstance that contradicts the downplayed representation of both stakeholders and the implementation phase in real-world gamification projects.

The results of the five dissertation studies display bipolar yet interdependent connections between the four stakeholder groups’ meaning attributions to gamification in the workplace learning environment. Dissimilar meaning attributions to gamification influence the implementation process to a high degree. Based on this premise, the dissertation emphasises the importance of identifying stakeholders’ meaning attributions to gamification in the learning environment as a way to facilitate its implementation in the organisation’s ecosystem. The implications of the PhD project’s findings served as the basis for the project’s primary contribution: a model for analysing and understanding organisational stakeholders’ requirements for gamification in the learning ecosystems of large enterprises.

The STAkeholder-centred GAmification (STAGA) model comprises a set of constructs highlighting the relationships among central stakeholders’ meaning attributions to and aspirations regarding gamification in the workplace learning context. STAGA is a process model intended for continually analysing and understanding organisational stakeholders and interpreting their meaning attributions to gamification. The model intends to aid and influence decision-making in the design and development process of gamification to facilitate its integration into the routines and practices of the workplace learning environment.