Cross-Level Moderation of Team Cohesion in Individuals’ Utilitarian and Hedonic Information Processing: Evidence in the Context of Team-Based Gamified Training
Authors: Kwak, Dong-Heon; Ma, Xiao; Polites, Greta; Srite, Mark; Hightower, Ross; Haseman, William D.
Journal: Journal of the Association for Information Systems (2019)
DOI: 10.17705/1jais.00532
Firms currently use teams extensively to accomplish organizational objectives. Furthermore, gamification has recently attracted much attention as a means of persuading employees and customers to engage in desired behaviors. Despite the importance of teams and the growing interest in gamification as a persuasion tool, past researchers have paid little attention to team-based gamification from a multilevel perspective. Based on motivational consistency theories, we hypothesize that at the team level, team performance has a positive effect on team cohesion. Drawing on the elaboration likelihood model (ELM), we further hypothesize two cross-level effects in the context of team-based gamified training: first, that team cohesion positively moderates the relationship between utilitarian perceptions (i.e., perceived quality of learning) and attitude; and second, that team cohesion negatively moderates the relationship between hedonic perceptions (i.e., perceived enjoyment of learning) and attitude. We tested our research model using an enterprise resource planning (ERP) simulation game involving 232 participants in 78 teams. The results of ordinary least squares and hierarchical linear mo…