Influence OF
Gamification
Joseph Washburn (Ph.D. Graduate) Aaron French (Dissertation Chair) John D’Arcy (Committee Member) Reza Vaezi (Committee Member) Prioritize reducing user overload and complexity over removing game features. Strengthen your employees’ IT identity to buffer technostress effects. Gamified elements alone are unlikely to increase employee technostress. Focus stress interventions on core technology demands and user perceptions.
AFFORDANCES ON
TECHNOSTRESS
MODERATED
BY IT
IDENTITY
Organizations increasingly embed game-like elements—points, badges, leaderboards—into workplace systems to enhance engagement. This dissertation investigates whether the gamelike action opportunities, gamification affordances, inadvertently contribute to technostress and how employees’ IT identity shapes that process. Drawing on transactional theory of stress, the research conceptualizes gamified system feedback as a stimulus subject to appraisal for threat, magnitude, and identity involvement. Using a two-study mixed-method design, Study 1 employed critical incident interviews to identify gamification affordances implicated in stressful experiences. Four affordances—feedback, competition, rewards, and visibility of achievement—emerged as salient in employees’ narratives. Study 2 then quantitatively tested whether these affordances, alongside established technostress creators (e.g., overload, complexity, insecurity), predicted technostress, and whether IT identity moderated these effects. Results demonstrate that traditional technostress creators significantly increase technostress, and that IT identity negatively moderates these relationships. Employees with stronger IT identity experienced weaker stress effects from classical technostress creators. Contrary to expectations, gamification affordances themselves did not significantly contribute to technostress formation. The findings refine technostress theory by integrating identity-based appraisal and clarifying boundary conditions for gamified systems. Practically, they suggest that stress in gamified workplaces stems less from game elements per se and more from enduring structural technology demands, moderated by users’ identity alignment with the system.
Coles Research Magazine | Ph.D. Program Dissertations
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