Gamification to motivate knowledge sharing between disparate teams within an organisation

Abstract

The extant body of knowledge suggests that the rate of technological advancement is increasing at an unprecedented speed, forcing organisations to adapt and learn at an even faster rate. Knowledge sharing, defined as an activity through which information, skills and expertise are exchanged between employees, drives organisational learning. While technology advances, organisations need to emphasise and develop a culture of knowledge sharing rather than knowledge hoarding. Managers need to demonstrate the importance of sharing knowledge by motivating their employees and providing a safe, constructive environment to do so. This study will explore how gamification can be used to motivate knowledge sharing within an organisation across disparate teams. Through the interrogation of the potential of self-determination theory to motivate people, a prototype will be designed to motivate knowledge sharing as part of the Design Science Research Process. Knowledge sharing within organisations promotes internal learning which improves the quality of product innovation and the overall work performance. When there is little to no sharing of work-related knowledge, it can cause poor organisational decisions and prevent innovation and growth. Organisations and managers need a system that will encourage and motivate individual employees to share their work-related knowledge in a safe constructive manner, as well as be able to find and process available knowledge. This research will bridge the gap and lean on the views of Mekler, Brühlmann, Tuch, and Opwis (2017) by creating a system and applying gamification as a motivational tool that will encourage and motivate for knowledge sharing. This study explores a general issue, which may be common across a variety of organisations and industries. In order to measure the effectiveness the artefact has on employees’ motivation to share knowledge, the study will make use of the Goal Question Metric approach. The outcome of this research is a gamified knowledge sharing system that will encourage and motivate employees to share work-related knowledge with their colleagues. The findings include 7 key topics that should be designed into an Information System to maximize knowledge sharing within an organisation. This research is important in that by addressing the problem it allows for more knowledge to be accessible and to be created within the organisation. This helps to enable better decision making and stimulate innovation and growth, to name a few benefits. In terms of scientific contribution, the expected results of this research will further advance gamification as a concept, how it can affect the work environment and whether it can be applied to an organisational system to improve employee motivation to share knowledge.