Localized Leaderboards Improve Motivation, Engagement, and Skill Learning in Employee Training

A preliminary experimental study examines whether localized leaderboards, which display a learner's ranking relative to nearby peers rather than the full organizational population, can improve motivation, engagement, and skill acquisition in phishing awareness training. The research compares three conditions, localized leaderboards, global leaderboards, and no leaderboard, among 24 employees at a Saudi government educational organization. The central claim is that localized leaderboards produce superior outcomes across all three dimensions.

The findings favor the localized condition consistently. Participants in the localized group achieved a 100% completion rate, compared with 75% in the other two groups, and averaged 8.13 quiz attempts against roughly 3.0 to 3.25 for the comparison groups. Phishing detection scores rose 23.7% from pre-test to post-test (9.50 to 11.75), while the global leaderboard group showed no meaningful gain and the control group declined by 2.7%. Survey measures drawn from the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory and User Engagement Scale indicated significantly higher perceived competence, effort and importance, and reward factor scores in the localized group, with reported differences reaching statistical significance at p<0.05.

The study's scope is narrow: a single organization, a single training domain, and a sample of 24 participants, all within one geographic and cultural context in Saudi Arabia. The authors explicitly caution that these limitations restrict generalizability and that the work should be regarded as preliminary. They also note the absence of long-term retention testing, which leaves open whether the observed skill gains persist beyond the training period, and they report no external funding or participation incentives that might have shaped engagement.

Overall, the work positions localized leaderboards as a promising design choice for workplace security training and calls for larger, multi-organization studies to confirm the effects, test durability, and determine whether results extend beyond phishing awareness to other gamified learning contexts.