Play Hard, Work (Too) Hard: The Impact of Gamification on Work Addiction, Burnout, and Turnover Intention

ABSTRACT

Gamification is being increasingly implemented within human resource management by organizations to incentivize employees to remain engaged with their work. However, despite nascent empirical evidence on the potential drawbacks of gamification for employees, our understanding of these consequences remains limited. Our study aims to explore the potential harmful effects of gamification affordances: reward, status, self‐expression, and competition. Using the conservation of resources theory, we posit that each affordance can alter the resource investment strategy of workers such that they develop work addiction. We propose that this pathological relationship with work, in turn, triggers a resource loss spiral leading to burnout (workers investing more resources than they can recover) and turnover intention (to protect oneself). The results of our 3‐wave study ( N  = 345 app‐workers) indicated that competition was associated with all outcomes as predicted. We propose theoretical and practical contributions for human resource management based on our results.