The Gamification of Work: Lessons From Crowdsourcing

Abstract

The nature of work and management are in flux; work is increasingly distributed, sporadic, community-driven, and motivated by constant self-development. Developments such as sharing economies, crowdfunding, and crowdsourcing have emerged as new forms of organizing work and economic coordination. At the same time, increased gaming and gamification of our lives have arrived to address this newly found yearning for intrinsically motivated work. Thus, work is increasingly consciously and unconsciously gamified. Crowdsourcing is a frontrunner management domain in employing gamification to positively affect motivation and performance of workers. However, to be able to harness the full potential of gamification, a union of knowledge of interwoven areas of game design, motivational psychology and management is needed. Therefore, in this article, based on the accumulated body of research on gamification in crowdsourcing, we discuss the emerging opportunities and challenges of using gamification in management.

Full text

https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492618790921
https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492618790921
Journal of Management Inquiry
1 –4
© The Author(s) 2018
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1056492618790921
jmi.sagepub.com
https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492618790921
Journal of Management Inquiry
1 –4
© The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1056492618790921
journals.sagepub.com/home/jmi
Article
The increasing ubiquitous interconnectedness based on
recent technological developments, such as the Internet and
smartphones, has enabled new modes of economic coordina-
tion and management to become feasible, such as crowd-
sourcing (Afuah & Tucci, 2012) and sharing economies
(Belk, 2014; Hamari, Sjöklint, & Ukkonen, 2016). Although
in the past, organizations commonly created value within
well-defined organizational structures, recent technological
advancements have made it feasible to coordinate and
employ large groups of Internet users—the crowd—in a host
of activities of collective value creation (Estellés-Arolas &
González-Ladrón-de-Guevara, 2012). As a result, more and
more organizations now apply crowdsourcing for outsourc-
ing various kinds of work to the crowd rather than using
employees or suppliers. The application of crowdsourcing
reaches diverse array of domains, which include, for exam-
ple, the creation of ideas and innovations (Bayus, 2013;
Hutter, Hautz, Füller, Mueller, & Matzler, 2011), the gather-
ing of knowledge, and the creation of user-generated content
(Nov, 2007), the solving of complex problems that require
creativity and human intelligence (Afuah & Tucci, 2012;
Cooper et al., 2010), the annotation of images, text, or video
data (von Ahn & Dabbish, 2008), and even the funding of
products (Paschen, 2017; Stemler, 2013). Business analysts
expect that 75% of high-performing enterprises will employ
crowdsourcing as part of their value creation by 2018
(Gartner, 2014) and many start-ups are known whose work-
force is primarily based on crowd workers (Tapscott &
Williams, 2011).
In parallel, business analysts also estimate that at least
50% of all organizations that manage such innovation pro-
cesses gamifiy their processes (Gartner, 2011) and reviews
of literature show that crowdsourcing systems are one of the
largest domains employing gamification (Koivisto &
Hamari, 2017; Morschheuser, Hamari, Koivisto, & Maedche,
2017), that is, organizations seek to make the crowdsourced
work activity more like playing a game (Vesa, Hamari,
Harviainen, & Warmelink, 2017) to provide other motives
for working than just monetary compensation (Colbert, Yee,
& George, 2016). However, while the new phenomenon
seems intuitively appealing, there is little coherent knowl-
edge on the gamification of work and its potential opportuni-
ties and challenges. Furthermore, to be able to harness the
full potential of gamification, a union of knowledge of inter-
woven areas of game design, motivational psychology and
management is needed. Therefore, in this article, based on
the accumulated body of research on gamification in crowd-
sourcing, we discuss the emerging opportunities and chal-
lenges of using gamification in management.
790921JMIXXX10.1177/1056492618790921Journal of Management InquiryMorschheuser and Hamari
research-article2018
1Gamification Group, Tampere University of Technology, Finland
2Institute of Information Systems and Marketing, Karlsruhe Institute of
Technology, Germany
3Gamification Group, University of Turku, Finland
4Gamification Group, University of Tampere, Finland
Corresponding Author:
Benedikt Morschheuser, Gamification Group, PO Box 527, FI-33101
Tampere, Finland.
Email: benedikt.morschheuser@kit.edu
The Gamification of Work: Lessons
From Crowdsourcing
Benedikt Morschheuser1,2 and Juho Hamari1,3,4
Abstract
The nature of work and management are in flux; work is increasingly distributed, sporadic, community-driven, and motivated
by constant self-development. Developments such as sharing economies, crowdfunding, and crowdsourcing have emerged as
new forms of organizing work and economic coordination. At the same time, increased gaming and gamification of our lives
have arrived to address this newly found yearning for intrinsically motivated work. Thus, work is increasingly consciously
and unconsciously gamified. Crowdsourcing is a frontrunner management domain in employing gamification to positively
affect motivation and performance of workers. However, to be able to harness the full potential of gamification, a union
of knowledge of interwoven areas of game design, motivational psychology and management is needed. Therefore, in this
article, based on the accumulated body of research on gamification in crowdsourcing, we discuss the emerging opportunities
and challenges of using gamification in management.
Keywords
gamification, crowdsourcing, human computation, motivation, participation, human resource, work

2 Journal of Management Inquiry 00(0)
Opportunities
Traditionally, participants in crowdsourcing approaches—
crowdsourcees—are being rewarded via extrinsic incentives
such as a monetary compensation. However, many studies
suggest that crowdsourcees’ participation and behaviors are
driven by yearning to satisfy intrinsic needs, such as possi-
bilities for self-development, curiosity, altruism, a sense of
competence, satisfaction, and accomplishment when solving
crowdsourcing tasks or relatedness with a community of
peers (Nov, 2007). As games are generally perceived as par-
ticularly effective in satisfying intrinsic needs (Ryan, Rigby,
& Przybylski, 2006), designers are increasingly gamifying
crowdsourcing systems (Goes, Guo, & Lin, 2016; Jung,
Schneider, & Valacich, 2010). In other words, designers
enrich crowdsourcing approaches with design features from
games to address the crowdsourcees’ intrinsic needs and
make participation in crowdsourcing a similarly appealing
experience as playing games. When designed appropriately,
gamification is believed to help in intrinsic need satisfaction,
that is, feeling competent, feeling of being part of a meaning-
ful group as well as a sense of autonomy (Ryan et al., 2006).
Therefore, in addition to possible cost-efficiencies of gamifi-
cation as a participation incentive, gamification makes par-
ticipation more autotelic and possibly more creative.
Various empirical studies indeed seem to indicate that gam-
ification is an effective approach to increase the motivation of
(crowd)workers and influence their behaviors, such as the
quantitative crowdsourcing participation, the contribution
quality and even the long-term engagement (Morschheuser,
Hamari, Koivisto, & Maedche, 2017). Different kinds of
implementation of gamification can lead to different motiva-
tional benefits and behavioral outcomes. For instance, the use
of gamification features that invoke competition among
crowdsourcees is a commonly found practice in the gamifica-
tion of crowdsourcing systems to positively influence the per-
formance of crowdsourcees in monotonous and repetitive
crowd (Jung et al., 2010; Liu, Li, & Santhanam, 2013). On the
contrary, gamification patterns exist that are geared to support
the quality of crowdsourcing outcomes or to motivate people
to work together (von Ahn & Dabbish, 2008). The versatility
of games and the possibility to adapt them to various themes
and contexts makes gamification a flexible and manifold
design direction. Furthermore, popular examples, such as
Waze (a navigation system with real-time, crowd-generated
traffic information), Yelp (a crowd-generated world-spanning
business directory), Ingress (an augmented reality game with a
crowd-generated database of landmarks and public art), or
Foldit (a gamified crowdsourcing approach for predicting
optimal protein structures and foldings), demonstrate that
using gamification in crowdsourcing can be applied in many
domains and for various purposes.
According to the theory of the firm, complicated projects
are commonly undertaken in-house (Williamson, 1975).
Therefore, crowdsourcing appears as exceptionally unintui-
tive form of organizing as coordinating a crowdsourcing proj-
ect can be regarded already complicated in itself. However, it
is generally observed that within games, collaboration forms
effortlessly and organically. Therefore, compared to competi-
tive gamification, cooperative game design not only holds the
potential to have people working together seamlessly, but
gamification in crowdsourcing also enables further cost effec-
tiveness by reducing the cost of coordinating human capital
(Morschheuser, Riar, Hamari, & Maedche, 2017).
Besides the increase of motivation and participation in
crowd work and the opportunity to reduce costs, the
onboarding and training of human capital is another aspect
where the use of gamification can be particularly beneficial.
Games are usually complex, challenging, and require spe-
cific skills. However, game designers have perfected game
design to teach users complicated tasks in simple and engag-
ing ways by using, for instance, playful tutorials, the succes-
sive increase of task complexity aligned with a player’s
experience, or narratives that can make complicated matters
more appealing. Especially in work environments with het-
erogeneous and difficult tasks, the application of such
approaches from games can help train crowdsourcees in the
execution of complex tasks, lower entry barriers, and attract
new participants, which is essential for the long-term pro-
ductivity of any crowd.
Challenges
Although from an optimistist’s perspective, the use of gami-
fication in work places seem to promise productivity and cre-
ativity with decreased cost and thus appears as an intuitively
appealing management strategy; various challenges in apply-
ing gamification effectively and meaningfully make gamifi-
cation a rather complex endeavor as a management practice.
First, gamification and crowdsourcing are both multifac-
eted phenomena; not all gamification implementations or
crowdsourcing projects are similar. There are several types
of crowdsourced work (Geiger & Schader, 2014), such as
crowdprocessing, crowdrating, crowdcreating, or crowd-
solving. Moreover, there also are the plethora of different
ways to employ gamification (Koivisto & Hamari, 2017). It
is rather common that an ignorance of the complexity of both
phenomena and the lack of more holistic understanding have
resulted in modest results (Landers, 2018). Therefore, practi-
tioners seeking to employ gamification in crowdsourcing
should remain mindful about the plethora of options and dif-
ferential fits between motivational design contra nature of
the work being crowdsourced. According to the corpus of
literature on gamified crowdsourcing, more monotonous
work has more commonly employed competitive and
achievement-based gamification implementations, while
implementations that seek diverse and creative (e.g.,
Amabile, Conti, Coon, Lazenby, & Herron, 1996, on

Morschheuser and Hamari 3
creativity) contributions typically employed more immersive
and cooperative gamification designs with a richer set of
mechanics (Morschheuser, Hamari, Koivisto, & Maedche,
2017).
Second, individuals all have differing aspirations, prefer-
ences, and performance-levels, which can make it inappropri-
ate to employ a monolithic gamification design for any kind
of system. Successful gamification designs, as a human tech-
nology, commonly require a comprehensive understanding of
the target group, including the organizational culture (e.g.,
Barney, 1986), goals of the workforce (Latham, 2004), the
level of proactivity in shaping the work (e.g., Wrzesniewski
& Dutton, 2001), and overall personality traits, needs, and
motives and precisely designed gamification affordances that
match the identified characteristics of the considered users
(Hamari, Hassan, & Dias, 2018). Furthermore, the experience
of users with a system and the motivation of individuals not
only in short- but also in long-term add another level of com-
plexity to the design of gamification, which can normally
only be counteracted by a continuous monitoring of user-
behavior and a repetitive adaptation of implemented gamifi-
cation features. However, the efforts and costs that are
required for realizing such user-centered, never-ending design
process can be easily underestimated, especially as the idea of
using game features instead of financial incentives appear, at
first glance, cost-effective and thus tempting.
Third, satisfying crowdsourcees’ intrinsic needs can be
regarded as the primary purpose of gamification in crowd-
sourcing. However, organizations seeking to employ gamifi-
cation may forget that workers might already be intrinsically
motivated without artificial inducement and already
immersed in pro-active crafting of their own work
(Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001). Therefore, gamification
may also have the negative potential to deteriorate the
healthy composition of existing motivations especially if, for
example, gamification is employed to (e.g., Amabile, 1979),
for instance, to create unwanted competition between people
where a productive collaboration already existed. Moreover,
games and their design features are commonly used for their
hedonic attraction, which can easily whitewash the reputable
purpose of a gamified activity, with possible negative effects
on the seriousness of the execution of the activity and thus
their output quality. An example for such possible negative
effects of gamification in crowd work is reported by Carlier
et al. (2016), who found that a gamified version of a crowd-
sourcing-based image segmentation systems led to a decrease
in the output quality compared with non-gamified crowd-
sourcing. Consequently, we are convinced that designers and
operators of crowdsourcing systems should carefully investi-
gate the motives of crowdsourcees and design gamification
reward mechanisms that take different motives into account
and reward the quality of contributions (Boons, Stam, &
Barkema, 2015; Hamari et al., 2018; von Ahn & Dabbish,
2008).
Fourth, while the majority of discussion on gamification
revolves around the positive psychology (e.g., Seligman &
Csikszentmihalyi, 2014) of games and their beneficial impact
on human behavior (Koivisto & Hamari, 2017; Ryan et al.,
2006), critics note that gamification possesses the dangers of
being used in unethical ways and that gamification can appear
as an awry manifestation of the “true” nature of good games
that are commonly regarded as the stem inspiration of gamifi-
cation (Kim, 2016). Simplistic gamification efforts have been
compared with, for example, exploitation ware, dark design
patterns, operant conditioning (Skinner, 1948), and design
that attempts to purposefully target cognitive biases and ratio-
nal weaknesses (e.g., Simon, 1982, on bounded rationality) in
efforts to unfairly benefit others than the users themselves.
Thus, applying gamification in labor, including crowdsourced
work, we should remain careful and conscious about the ethi-
cal dilemma of replacing income with bells and whistles. It is
important to strive to develop gamification in ways that can
support the intrinsic aspirations, cooperation and self-devel-
opment also beyond simply increasing the enjoyability of
work activities, rather than attempting to myopically change
the behavior of people in the short term.
In sum, while the nature of work is changing and is
becoming increasingly digital, distributed, creative, and
driven by social and intrinsic motivations, gamification
promises to be able to provide appropriate incentives for
these new forms of value creation. However, as the opportu-
nities of using gamification are as diverse as the nature of
games themselves (Deterding, 2018), management scholars
and practitioners should not underestimate the complexity of
gamifying work environments. Moreover, the ethical conse-
quences and costs of employing gamification in management
need to be considered. Even if many studies consistently
report positive results of the gamification of work, we lack
coherent knowledge about the weaknesses and challenges of
gamification. Thus, we hope that this article may act as an
anchoring point that encourages scholars and practitioners to
further investigate the gamification of work.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support
for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This
research has been supported by Business Finland (40111/14,
40107/14, 40009/16 and 5479/31/2017) and project partners,
Satakunnan korkeakoulusäätiö and its collaborators, and Academy
of Finland (Center of Excellence - GameCult).
References
Afuah, A., & Tucci, C. (2012). Crowdsourcing as a solution to dis-
tant search. Academy of Management Review, 37, 355-375.

4 Journal of Management Inquiry 00(0)
Amabile, T. M. (1979). Effects of external evaluation on artistic
creativity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37,
221-233.
Amabile, T. M., Conti, R., Coon, H., Lazenby, J., & Herron,
M. (1996). Assessing the work environment for creativity.
Academy of Management Journal, 39, 1154-1184.
Barney, J. B. (1986). Organizational culture: Can it be a source of
sustained competitive advantage? Academy of Management
Review, 11, 656-665.
Bayus, B. L. (2013). Crowdsourcing new product ideas over time:
An analysis of the Dell Ideastorm community. Management
Science, 59, 226-244.
Belk, R. (2014). You are what you can access: Sharing and col-
laborative consumption online. Journal of Business Research,
67, 1595-1600.
Boons, M., Stam, D., & Barkema, H. G. (2015). Feelings of pride and
respect as drivers of ongoing member activity on crowdsourcing
platforms. Journal of Management Studies, 52, 717-741.
Carlier, A., Salvador, A., Cabezas, F., Giro-i-Nieto, X., Charvillat,
V., & Marques, O. (2016). Assessment of crowdsourcing
and gamification loss in user-assisted object segmentation.
Multimedia Tools and Applications, 23, 15901-15928.
Colbert, A., Yee, N., & George, G. (2016). The digital workforce
and the workplace of the future. Academy of Management
Journal, 59, 731-739.
Cooper, S., Khatib, F., Treuille, A., Barbero, J., Lee, J., Beenen,
M., . . . Players, F. (2010). Predicting protein structures with a
multiplayer online game. Nature, 466, 756-760.
Deterding, S. (2018). Gamification in Management: Between
Choice Architecture and Humanistic Design. Journal of
Management Inquiry. Advance online publication on August
15, 2018 doi: 10.1177/1056492618790912
Estellés-Arolas, E., & González-Ladrón-de-Guevara, F. (2012).
Towards an integrated crowdsourcing definition. Journal of
Information Science, 38, 189-200.
Gartner. (2011). Gartner says by 2015, more than 50 percent of
organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify
those processes. Retrieved from http://www.gartner.com/it/
page.jsp?id=1629214
Gartner. (2014). Predicts 2015: Sourcing strategies shift from
“built to last” to “built to Adapt.” Retrieved from https://www.
gartner.com/doc/2925517/predicts–sourcing-strategies-shift
Geiger, D., & Schader, M. (2014). Personalized task recommenda-
tion in crowdsourcing information systems—Current state of
the art. Decision Support Systems, 65, 3-16.
Goes, P. B., Guo, C., & Lin, M. (2016). Do incentive hierarchies
induce user effort? Evidence from an online knowledge
exchange. Information Systems Research, 27, 497-516.
Hamari, J., Hassan, L., & Dias, A. (2018). Gamification, quanti-
fied-self or social networking? Matching users’ goals with
motivational technology. User Modeling and User-Adapted
Interaction, 28, 35-74.
Hamari, J., Sjöklint, M., & Ukkonen, A. (2016). The sharing
economy: Why people participate in collaborative consump-
tion. Journal of the Association for Information Science and
Technology, 67, 2047-2059.
Hutter, K., Hautz, J., Füller, J., Mueller, J., & Matzler, K. (2011).
Communitition: The tension between competition and col-
laboration in community-based design contests. Creativity and
Innovation Management, 20, 3-21.
Jung, J. H., Schneider, C., & Valacich, J. (2010). Enhancing
the motivational affordance of information systems: The
effects of real-time performance feedback and goal setting in
group collaboration environments. Management Science, 56,
724-742.
Kim, T. W. (2016). Gamification of labor and the charge of exploi-
tation. Journal of Business Ethics. Advance online publication.
doi:10.1007/s10551-016-3304-6
Koivisto, J., & Hamari, J. (2017). The rise of motivational infor-
mation systems: A review of gamification research (Working
paper).
Landers, R. N. (2018). Gamification Misunderstood: How
Badly Executed and Rhetorical Gamification Obscures Its
Transformative Potential. Journal of Management Inquiry.
Advance online publication on August 22, 2018. doi: 10.1177/
1056492618790913
Latham, G. P. (2004). The motivational benefits of goal-setting.
The Academy of Management Executive, 18, 126-129.
Liu, D., Li, X., & Santhanam, R. (2013). Digital games and beyond:
What happens when players compete? MIS Quarterly, 37,
111-124.
Morschheuser, B., Hamari, J., Koivisto, J., & Maedche, A. (2017).
Gamified crowdsourcing: Conceptualization, literature review,
and future agenda. International Journal of Human-Computer
Studies, 106, 26-43.
Morschheuser, B., Riar, M., Hamari, J., & Maedche, A. (2017).
How games induce cooperation? A study on the relationship
between game features and we-intentions in an augmented
reality game. Computers in Human Behavior, 77, 169-183.
Nov, O. (2007). What motivates Wikipedians? Communications of
the ACM, 50(11), 60-64.
Paschen, J. (2017). Choose wisely: Crowdfunding through the
stages of the startup life cycle. Business Horizons, 60, 179-188.
Ryan, R. M., Rigby, C. S., & Przybylski, A. (2006). The moti-
vational pull of video games: A self-determination theory
approach. Motivation and Emotion, 30, 344-360.
Seligman, M. E., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2014). Positive psy-
chology: An introduction. In M. Csikszentmihalyi (Ed.),
Flow and the foundations of positive psychology (pp. 279-
298). Heidelberg, Germany: Springer.
Simon, H. A. (1982). Models of bounded rationality: Empirically
grounded economic reason (Vol. 3). Cambridge, MA: MIT press.
Skinner, B. F. (1948). “Superstition” in the pigeon. Journal of
Experimental Psychology, 38, 168-172.
Stemler, A. (2013). The JOBS Act and crowdfunding: Harnessing
the power—and money—of the masses. Business Horizons,
56, 271-285.
Tapscott, D., & Williams, A. D. (2011). MacroWikinomics:
Rebooting business and the world. London, England: Atlantic
Books.
Vesa, M., Hamari, J., Harviainen, J. T., & Warmelink, H. (2017).
Computer games and organization studies. Organization
Studies, 38, 273-284.
von Ahn, L., & Dabbish, L. (2008). Designing games with a pur-
pose. Communications of the ACM, 51(8), 57-67.
Williamson, O. E. (1975). Markets and hierarchies: Analysis and
antitrust implications. New York, NY: Free Press.
Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E. (2001). Crafting a job:
Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work.
Academy of Management Review, 26, 179-201.