Gamification Impact on Agile Team Motivation: Theoretical Framework

Contemporary organisations face the challenge of responding to growing requirements and expectations in a modern and dynamic business environment. Moreover, changes in the workforce and modern work culture are leading to an increasing need for complex problem-solving, progressiveness, flexibility and rapid adaptation in the management of organisations. Employees enable the organisation to rapidly sense and respond to unpredicted threats and opportunities through their actions, leveraging them for strategic advantage. Altogether it led to adopting the Agile approach in management, initially created for manufacturing and software development methods. Today the Agile approach helps to improve teamwork, adapt to changes, and achieve goals more efficiently. Moreover, it is becoming more strongly associated with the management of organisations and emerging as a standard in modern business environments. Furthermore, the Agile approach has transformed into a method to organise work in the organisation. So, Agile teams are becoming a critical and central unit in the organisation. This poses new challenges in Human Resource Management (HRM) on how to motivate Agile teams, because not only the individual motivation of the employees within the team becomes important, but also the overall motivation of the team as a whole. One of the well-known and recognised tools for motivating employees is gamification. Researchers and HRM practitioners defined gamification as the application of game elements in non-game environments. Gamification application aims to create stimuli that enrich the work environment by stimulating employee motivation and encouraging employees to achieve their goals in an engaging, novel and fun way. It is known that gamification has been applied in the context of Agile teams. With the growing popularity of Agile teams in organisations, gamification is becoming an integral part of their work environment. Despite gamification and Agile team embedding in organisations, existing research does not provide enough knowledge about Agile team motivation from the collective perspective, specifically, what set of shared needs an Agile team has and how these can be met through gamification. So, this study aims to address theoretical gaps in understanding how gamification impacts Agile team motivation by reviewing existing research and developing a conceptual theoretical model explaining the impact of gamification on Agile team motivation. The systematic literature review examines empirical research on gamification in HRM and analyses peer-reviewed articles on agile teams, their performance and effectiveness published in Web of Science, Scopus, and other databases over the last decade. The literature analysis revealed that an Agile team can be characterised by a set of shared needs that can be met through gamification to increase team motivation. This study contributes to the development of theory on how gamification affects the collective level of a team in general. Moreover, this research can provide insights that can be applied to organisational management practice and policy creation.