ABSTRACT
Cooperation between individuals is a core essence of organizing. However, as witnessed in several organizations, cooperation and collaboration are difficult to cultivate, and they might not emerge organically either. One of the primary hurdles related to lack of cooperation is that people often do not work toward mutual goals but are rather motivationally distracted or impaired due to several possible factors such as differently oriented goals compared to coworkers or the simple lack of individual motivation toward the organization’s goals. Recently, it has been profoundly observed and realized that in (video) games cooperation appears to emerge effortlessly. Games indeed seem to address these issues; games afford voluntary, intrinsically motivated activity, and they explicitly or implicitly build consistencies that afford convergence of people’s goals. Therefore, gamification has become a trending phenomenon that is now being applied across fields to remedy deficiencies stemming from the lack of motivational ergonomy such as the ones in organizational praxis. In this chapter we peruse the extant case-based corpus of literature that has investigated the use of gamification in attempts to increase cooperation in organizations. We investigate how and what kind of gamification has been applied, in what kinds of organizational fields it has been applied in, to what forms of cooperation it has been used to enhance, as well as what motivational benefits it has been intended to account for. Beyond describing the results in extant literature, we also weigh the discourses emerging from the extant corpus in terms of the expected benefits and detriments of gamification.
