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Gamification is an innovative approach to foster motivation. It refers to the use of game elements in non-game contexts. This article adopts a differentiated view on the topic of gamification and investigates, how and why different game elements can address different motivational mechanisms. At first, the concept of gamification and specific game elements characteristic of gamification are described. After that, different motivational perspectives were analyzed and motivational mechanisms in form of effect hypotheses were derived from these perspectives. To investigate the motivational pull of gamification, game elements are matched with motivational mechanisms. Our theoretical inquiry shows that gamification potentially addresses motivational mechanisms and thereby fosters motivation. These theoretical results can be used for the effective design of gamification environments and represent a basis for empirical research. Further research is required to confirm these theoretical findings.

Staff motivation as a key challenge in logisticsLogistics is concerned with effectively managing the flow of materials and supplies for production, commerce and other purposes (Christopher, 2003). Transport logistics deals with resource flows on a large scale level, as it involves transport by land, water, and air. A second domain of logistics is intralogistics, which is concerned with the internal handling of materials and supplies within specific production sites or intermediate storage facilities (Arnold, 2006). This paper focuses on intralogistics or, more specifically, on one of its central tasks, order picking.Despite ongoing automation efforts, order picking still frequently involves intensive and repetitive manual labour. For fulfilling a customer order, workers typically receive lists of items to be picked from storage and combined in a shipment. Orders have to be fulfilled under time constraints with as few errors as possible in shifts which can easily involve dozens of orders. Due to these challenges and context conditions, and taking into account that order picking is typically performed by low-paid unskilled workers, it is not surprising that staff motivation and high turnover rates are recurrent problems for efficiency in intralogistics. However, most optimization approaches in order picking concentrate on technical aspects, leaving out the human factor (cf. Coffey, 1999). This paper introduces gamification as an innovative approach to enhance staff motivation in intralogistics. Gamification is a recent trend (originally from marketing) that quickly spread to other areas of application such as education and training, traffic control, or influencing environmental behaviour. Conceptually, gamification denotes the application of game elements for engagement, motivation, learning, or problem-solving purposes in non-gaming, real world contexts (cf. Kapp, 2012, p. 10). As games continually succeed in luring players into investing large amounts of time and effort, it is expected that some of the mechanisms making them effective entertainment devices can also be used in nongaming environments.