The Effects of Gamification on Corporate Compliance Training: A Field Experiment of True Office Anti-Corruption Training Programs

Companies rely on internal controls to comply with the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the U.K. Bribery Act. One such control is anti-corruption employee training. Although corporate training is a key component of anti-fraud policies and procedures, it is often perceived as dull by employees. To motivate greater engagement, firms are experimenting with training that involves elements of digital games, known as gamification. We perform a field experiment with 158 employees of a large, multinational bank to examine the effectiveness of gamified anti-corruption training. We find that employees strongly prefer gamified training to traditional, non-gamified training and that gamified training modestly increases employees’ knowledge of the bank’s anti-corruption policies. Interestingly, we also find that employees with less work experience outperform those with greater work experience on the post-training knowledge assessment. Our results suggest that gamification is a valuable tool for improving anti-corruption training.