Gamifying Digital Work: An Empirical Investigation how Gamification Affects IS Use Appraisal

Information systems (IS) and their healthy use are becoming increasingly important in the digital work environment. The cognitive appraisal of an IS-enabled demand is decisive for whether IS use leads to positive or negative outcomes. This work investigates how gamification integrated into IS can support challenge appraisal and reduce threat appraisal of IS-enabled demands. We conduct an online experiment to examine the impact of gamification on appraisal. We simulate time urgency in a gamified IS and examine how challenge and threat appraisal develop among participants during the experiment. We examine the panel data with a Latent Growth Model and find that gamified IS does not initially reduce threat appraisal but reduces it over time. Challenge appraisal is not significantly higher among users working in gamified IS. That this hypothesiszed effect does not show in the data might require further research. Our paper contributes to a better understanding of the cognitive appraisal process in IS use research and identifies gamification as a valuable tool to positively influence the cognitive appraisal process.