Designing and Evaluating Game-Based Organizational Interventions: Quantitative and Qualitative Evidence from Two Longitudinal Quasi-Experimental Studies

Game-based interventions have attracted growing interest in organizational training, yet rigorous longitudinal evidence on their effectiveness and methodological design remains limited. The present paper reports two longitudinal quasi-experimental studies investigating the design, implementation, and evaluation of organizational game-based interventions. Study 1 quantitatively evaluated an intervention targeting collaboration among colleagues in a public social services organization (N = 54 at baseline). Study 2 qualitatively examined changes in employees’ representations of responsibility management, disagreement resolution, collaboration, and communication in a private consulting company (N = 10 at baseline). Both interventions followed a structured methodological approach based on organizational needs assessment, targeted game selection, structured experiential debriefing, and longitudinal evaluation. In Study 1, collaboration among colleagues increased slightly but significantly over time, whereas the other organizational variables showed no comparable improvements. In Study 2, exploratory lexical analyses suggested changes in employees’ representations of the target processes immediately after the intervention, whereas follow-up findings were limited and descriptive. Together, the findings suggest that the longitudinal changes associated with organizational game-based interventions depend not only on the games employed but also on the methodological approach through which they are designed, implemented, and evaluated. Building on these findings, we propose the ON GAMES methodological approach as a preliminary framework for designing and evaluating such interventions.