Responsiveness to Persuasive Strategies at the Workplace: A Case Study

Persuasive technology capitalizes on the use of technology and the art of persuasion to change the behaviors and attitudes of people without the use of coercion. They have been used at workplaces to achieve positive outcomes like increase in employee motivation, engagement and productivity. While a number of researchers have investigated the effectiveness of Cialdini’s principles of persuasion, little or no research has been conducted in the context of work environments. In many workplaces, it is important that employees provide detailed records of their activities for easy tracking of an organization’s day-to-day activities and future historical reference. However, research has shown that some employees find it difficult to comply. In an attempt to address this problem, we carried out a pilot study among 20 healthcare Applied Behavior Analysis(ABA) frontline employees, working with autistic patients. The study is aimed at investigating how effective Cialdini’s principles of persuasion are in motivating employees to record details about the sessions they have with patients. A Two-Way Mixed ANOVA analysis showed that ABA frontline employees are most susceptible to Commitment and Reciprocity, followed by Authority, and least susceptible to Consensus and Scarcity. These results suggest that designers of gamified persuasive systems tailored to healthcare ABA frontline staff should focus on implementing Commitment, Reciprocity and Authority as persuasive strategies aimed at motivating them in engaging in sufficient and quality data entry.