Localized Leaderboards Improve Motivation, Engagement, and Skill Learning in Employee Training

Abstract

This paper presents a preliminary study comparing the educational impact of localized and global leaderboards through an experiment on phishing awareness training in a government organization. The primary contribution shows that narrowing the leaderboard scope to departmental levels can improve employee motivation, engagement, and training performance compared to traditional global and no-leaderboard conditions. An experiment was conducted with 24 participants, uniformly assigned to three groups: localized leaderboard, global leaderboard, and a control group with no leaderboard. Participants completed a web-based phishing awareness training using an online platform developed specifically for this study, consisting of 12 sequential modules, including three gamified quiz activities. Leaderboard scores were calculated based on quiz performance, rewarding both accuracy and response speeds. Motivation was assessed through training completion rate and the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory survey. Engagement was assessed through the number of attempts, usage of coaching hints, and the User Engagement Scale survey. Performance increase was measured using pre- and post-test scores, and group differences were examined via a contrast analysis. The localized leaderboard group showed the highest motivation (100% completion rate compared with 75% for the global leaderboard and control conditions), and the highest engagement (average of 8.13 attempts compared with 3.25 for the global leaderboard and 3.0 for the control), along with a 23.7% improvement in phishing detection performance (compared with no improvement in global leaderboard and a decline of 2.7% in the control group). The analysis showed a statistically significant difference between localized leaderboards and the global leaderboards, no leaderboards, and their combination (p<0.05). These findings offer preliminary evidence that localized leaderboards can improve motivation, engagement, and learning in phishing awareness training by promoting socially relevant comparisons among colleagues. Even though the small sample size limits generalizability, it suggests large-scale, organizational studies on localized leaderboard use in training.