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Short Abstract

This study explores how gamification can enhance ethics literacy and ethical decision-making in workplace contexts. An educational game on moral dilemmas uses role-switching and reflection mechanisms, which will be tested in an experiment to inform ethics education and corporate training.

Abstract

Everyday workplace issues, such as vacation scheduling, career advancement, or salary and bonus distribution, can present unfamiliar challenges for employees and managers, who are seldom trained to navigate them in academic or professional settings. These situations often develop into moral dilemmas within social interactions and may escalate into interpersonal conflicts with broader implications for organizational culture and external stakeholders. To address this challenge, our study investigates how motivational information technologies, particularly gamification, can enhance ethics literacy and foster ethical decision-making in workplace contexts. We are developing an educational game that immerses players in realistic moral dilemmas arising in organizational settings. The game design integrates two key mechanisms: (1) role-switching (same role vs. changing roles) and (2) reflection perspective (self-immersed vs. self-distanced). Furthermore, we plan to conduct a 2 (Same Role vs. Changing Roles) × 2 (Self-immersed vs. Self-distanced) between-subject online experiment with working adults to examine how these mechanisms shape learning experience and outcomes related to ethics education, perspective-taking, decision-making, and stress regulation in professional environments. This research contributes to the interdisciplinary fields of information technology, psychology, educational sciences, and business management, while also producing a practical research artifact, an educational game, applicable to both corporate training and university curricula.