The Gamification of Creativity: Unlocking Potential in the Workplace
Ways to Help Your Team Be More Creative
Summary: This article discusses recent creativity research and its implications for workplace teams. Gamification techniques which tap into intrinsic motivators like competence and achievement can be more effective for creative tasks compared to excessive monetary rewards. Research suggests that incentivising innovation is complex; a purpose and autonomy-focused approach with game elements and some pressure works best to drive creative output.
Finding ways to motivate creativity and innovation is a priority for many organisations and teams, but determining the best incentives is complex. Prior research on creativity has focused extensively on intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivators like interest, satisfaction and purpose tend to enhance creativity more than extrinsic rewards like money. In Product Development teams intrinsic task motivation has been shown to have a positive effect on the team’s creative performance in terms of both the developed product’s degree of innovation and its quality. At the same time, extrinsic incentives can also boost creativity for specific tasks and contexts (Eisenberger & Shanock, 2003; Malek et al., 2020). For example, recognition and social rewards can have a positive influence on intrinsic task motivation and creative performance of new Product Development teams.
Recent attention has turned to gamification - the use of game elements like points, leaderboards and badges in non-game settings. This is an approach that has been traditionally used by Sales teams to increase productivity and engagement. For example, offering incentives and having team leaderboards to celebrate the top performers. Research has shown that by tapping into needs for competence, achievement and status, gamification may increase engagement and creativity (Koivisto & Hamari, 2019). However, direct comparisons of gamification versus monetary incentives are lacking.
A new study by Xu and Hamari published in Creativity Research Journal aimed to address this gap by testing the effects of gamification, money and punishment incentives on creativity.
Researchers conducted an experiment with 102 students to test the impact of different incentives on creative performance in an alternative uses divergent thinking task. This task is a widely used divergent thinking test that measures divergent thinking, which is the ability to generate multiple ideas or solutions to a single problem and is linked to creativity. The test was designed in 1967 and asks participants to think of as many uses as possible for a simple object, such as a brick, a shoe, or a paperclip. The test is usually time-constrained, and the participant is expected to generate as many ideas as possible within the given time frame.
Participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups: control (no incentive), gamification (leaderboard and badges), monetary reward (small payment per idea), or punishment (points deducted for poor performance). Their creative output was then evaluated by independent raters on four dimensions - fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration.
The results showed that creativity was significantly higher in the gamification and punishment conditions compared to control and monetary reward. Gamification led to the highest overall creativity, outperforming even punishment. Monetary rewards did not have a significant effect on creativity compared to no incentive. A follow-up study with a larger monetary reward also found no difference versus control.
There are some limitations to consider. As a lab study with students, real world contexts may differ. The incentives and tasks were also relatively basic, and creativity was evaluated by third party raters. Factors like personality, culture and task type may moderate the effects. More research in organisational settings is needed.
Ways to Boost Your Team’s Creativity
For UX professionals (or anyone) interested in boosting creativity, this study suggests some key takeaways:
Gamification might be effective at increasing creativity. Game mechanics like points, badges, leaderboards can increase intrinsic motivation and creativity better than money. Consider introducing playful gamification elements in creative tasks requiring idea generation (e.g., ideation process, workshops).
Think before offering excessive monetary rewards for creative tasks. Large payouts don't necessarily lead to better ideas compared to no incentives at all. Focus more on meaning, autonomy and purpose.
Moderate pressure can help. While too much control stifles creativity, a little pressure like performance penalties or time restraints may increase focus, effort and creative output if used sparingly.
Test different incentives and motivators. There is no one size fits all solution for all teams. Experiment to find the right mix of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators tailored to your team and organisational culture. If you’re a manager, get to know your team before deciding what incentives to use.
This research provides useful insights for boosting workplace creativity and suggest that we need to move beyond traditional rewards and take a more nuanced approach to design and innovation. Leveraging gamification, purpose and some performance pressure could provide better results than purely monetary incentives. More research is still needed on optimal motivational design but it's clear that incentivising creativity takes more than just throwing money at the problem.