How to motivate employees towards organizational energy conservation: Insights based on employees perceptions and an IoT-enabled gamified IS intervention

Abstract

Employees can help organizations attain Corporate Environmental Performance (CEP) goals and save on energy bills, by conserving electricity. However, they lack the motivation. Information Systems (IS)-enabled energy-related feedback interventions featuring gamification (utilizing game-design elements), have been suggested to increase organizational energy conservation. To identify the behavioral factors that should be considered when designing such interventions towards optimizing their results, this paper focuses on unravelling the intricacies of employee energy consumption behavior and providing answers to the research question: “What drives employees to save energy at work?”. Our research is conducted in three workplaces across Europe. First, we analyze employees' energy-saving motivation and behavior at an individual level of analysis to identify defining behavioral factors behind it. Then, considering these drivers of employees' energy consumption behavior, we focus on answering the question: “How a gamified IS that provides real-time energy usage feedback affects employees' motivation to conserve energy at work, and in turn the actual energy savings in organizations”. Our findings suggest that employees' level of self-determination to conserve energy, energy-saving personal norms, and personal and organizational profile, significantly explain both their energy-saving behavior and the energy behavior change attained through a gamified IS intervention. Moreover, the provision of feedback to employees, via an Internet-Of-Things (IoT)-enabled gamified IS, is proven an effective strategy for accomplishing actual energy conservation at work. The acquired insight on what drives employees' energy usage behavior supports the design of gamified IS interventions that have higher motivational capacity and, thus, can change employees' energy behavior. When designing behavioral interventions aimed at energy conservation at work, we should primarily focus on monitoring (to decide whether a behavioral intervention would be worth organizing) and ultimately positively affecting employees' energy-saving habits and intention. Our findings can be transformed to specific practical suggestions for firms to encourage employees’ energy saving behavior when aspiring to attain CEP goals. They include satisfying their basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, activating their personal norms in the context of energy-saving at work, and educating and encouraging them towards specific energy-saving behaviors by utilizing gamified IoT-enabled IS that keep their energy-saving “in shape”.