Leadership models in the gamification context: case study

Abstract

The present work addresses the association of leadership quality factors (e.g. decision direction success and effectiveness of strategic moves) and gamification. In the last 30 years, commerce and international investments have increased faster than world economy as a whole. In order to deal with such complex environment, leaders and their decision making processes (either formal or informal) play a crucial role. Therefore, the study of leader’s performance while attempting to solve real-life gamified scenarios, correlated with leadership factors, provide a powerful (yet underutilized) analysis instrument. The work proposed in this paper attempts to contribute for the business management area, which is typically focused in determining correlations between leadership factors framed by literature models and behaviour analysis of leaders in the different contexts. The present investigation comprehends the following objectives: analysis of leadership models and their framework in the scope of a management simulator; the effectiveness of gamification for organizational learning. Such objectives are achieved through: correlating operational results with leadership styles for players managing a company; to understand how the management style can and will affect the game final results; to identify prominent leadership styles during the game. The gamification consists of a management scenario that simulates one virtual year in a company and requires four quarterly decisions. The assessed sample of gamers consisted of 93 players. At the end of the game each player answered a leadership survey to assess leadership factors. The results obtained suggest a stronger focus on a decision making scope of traits model.