A Serious Game on Shaping Employee Behavior for the Digital Transformation

DITInLine is a serious game designed to help organizations use human resource management to shape employee behaviors needed for digital transformation, which is organizational change driven by widespread technology adoption. The game challenges professionals to select and combine HR practices into a configuration aligned with the organization's strategy, using the competing values framework to define four strategic orientations: cooperative, adhocratic, mechanistic, and market-oriented. Players aim to raise a hidden digital transformation behavior score, which reflects adaptive performance and proactive agile behaviors, while also tracking how well their choices fit the organizational strategy. The game draws on a pool of 72 HR practices from an earlier serious game, InLine, narrowed to 24 for this version, each scored from -50 to +50 based on literature and carrying alignment scores drawn from HR professionals' practical knowledge.

Gameplay runs over two to three rounds with teams of up to six professionals, moving through introduction, practice selection, prioritization, specification of concrete actions, and evaluation of outcomes. The authors argue that the game offers a risk-free environment for experimenting with HR decisions, makes managerial choices explicit enough to study, and presents a falsifiable theoretical framework linking HR, strategy alignment, and digital transformation behaviors. The paper is primarily a design document describing the prototype rather than an empirical study, so no playtest data, sample sizes, or validated outcome measures are reported.

The authors identify several limitations and planned improvements. The impact scores of HR practices rest on literature rather than empirical assessment, the alignment scores depend on professional judgment, mutually exclusive or synergistic practice combinations are not yet modeled, and the learning effects of the game have not been systematically validated. Test sessions were being planned at the time of writing.