AI-Enabled Gamification in the Workplace: A Behavioral Economics Approach to Employee Engagement in the IT Workforce

Organizations are increasingly embedding game design elements into everyday work systems to sustain employee motivation and engagement. Examples include points, badges, leaderboards, progress bars, and algorithmically personalized feedback systems. The increase in research in the area of gamification applies not only to education and customer-facing contexts but also to organizations, especially in knowledge-intensive sectors such as the IT landscape. This study presents and verifies an integrated model connecting Gamified Work Systems (GWS) with Employee Engagement (EE) through two mediating processes: the motivational response generated by personalized, algorithmically administered feedback and Decision-Framing Effects (DFE) shaped by the presentation of goals and progress. These two processes feed into Cognitive Immersion (CI). The proposed model was evaluated using structural equation modeling, using survey data collected from IT professionals based on self-determination theory, prospect theory, and flow theory. The research outcomes suggest that direct framing and indirect personalized feedback affect employees decisions regarding gamified systems. Furthermore, the impact of the first-mentioned framing has a stronger downstream relationship with immersion than the feedback with AI driven effect of motivation. This study is significant because it extends behavioral economics thinking on choice architecture to the workplace gamification area, providing guidance on how to design engagement systems.