When gamification backfires: the impact of perceived justice on online community contributions

ABSTRACT

While online communities may enhance firm performance, they commonly fail to retain members. To address this challenge, scholars and managers call for the use of gamification. However, despite gamification’s growing use in online communities, insight into its effect on member experience and behaviours remain limited. We hypothesise that gamification affects member-perceived distributive and procedural justice. In experimental studies, we assess the impact of in-gamification perceived justice on member contributions. We find that while high in-gamification perceived procedural justice acts as a necessary prerequisite for member contributions, high distributive justice can reduce game-related uncertainty, thereby rendering gamified practices less fun, particularly for low-engaged community members that tend to value rewards. We add to the literature by (a) pinpointing the core role of perceived justice in the persistence of online communities, and (b) unveiling that high distributive justice can lead gamification to backfire in online communities by affecting member experience and contributions.

KEYWORDS:

• Gamification
• consumer engagement
• online community
• justice
• experience

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas Leclercq

Thomas Leclercq, PhD is Assistant Professor of Marketing at IESEG School of Management (Lille, France). He received his PhD in Economics and Management Sciences from the Louvain School of Management (Belgium) in 2017. His research interests relate to service, innovation and digital marketing. His work mainly concerns value co-creation, online communities, customer engagement and gamification. He has presented his works in numerous prestigious conferences and won several awards for his research communications. His publications can be found in highly recognized journals such as Journal of Interactive Marketing, Technological Forecasting and Social change, Journal of Service Management and International Journal of Electronic Commerce.

Ingrid Poncin

Ingrid Poncin is Associate Professor of Marketing at Catholic University of Louvain and a member of Center of Excellence on Consumers and Marketing Strategy (CCMS). She is in charge of the Ipm Digital Marketing Chair. She completed her PhD in Marketing at Louvain School of Management (Belgium) for which she received the “Gouverneur Cornez Award”. She is qualified researcher (HDR) from Lille II University, France. Her research interests concern use and measurement of affects in marketing, attachment toward brand and company, digital marketing, gamification, multichannel consumer behavior, avatars, adoption of new technologies and consumer behavior in the digital world. She has published in international journals such as Journal of Advertising, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Information & Management, Technological Forecasting and Social change and Journal of Business Research.

Wafa Hammedi

Wafa Hammedi, PhD is Associate Professor of Service Innovation and Marketing at the Faculty of Economics and Management (University of Namur, Belgium). She is also an academic Scholar at Cornell University, USA. She received her PhD from the Institute for Management Research of the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her primary research interests are service innovation and marketing. Her work focuses on virtual communities, customer engagement and customer co-creation experiences. She published in highly recognized journals, among others, in the Journal of Product Innovation Management, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Service Management, Decision Management, Journal of Business Research and several book chapters. She won several prestigious awards for her research papers. She is also the co-founder and co-chair of the international conference Let's Talk about Service (LTAS) empowered by SERVSIG of the American Marketing Association (AMA).

Avreliane Kullak

Avreliane Kullak is PhD student in the Department of Marketing at University of Louvain, Belgium. She is a member of the Louvain Research Institute in Management and Organizations (LouRIM) and the Center of Excellence on Consumers and Marketing Strategy (CCMS). Her research interests are in the fields of social and digital marketing. She participated in WMC AMS in 2018 (Porto).

Linda D. Hollebeek

Linda D. Hollebeek, PhD, is Senior Associate Professor at Montpellier Business School, and Full Professor (Adj.) at Tallinn University of Technology. Her research centres on customer/stakeholder engagement, technology, and interactive brand relationships and value. Her work to date has published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Service Research, Industrial Marketing Management, and Journal of Interactve Marketing, among others. She is Associate Editor of European Journal of Marketing and lead editor of the Handbook of Research on Customer Engagement (co-edited with Prof David Sprott, 2019).