Influence of Psychological Distance on Process Modeling: A Gamification Approach

Nowadays, Business Process Management (BPM) has progressed significantly and established itself as an important management concept for enterprises. For creating efficient and effective business processes enterprises have given process models a high priority. A well-documented business process is intended not only to describe a procedure
in detail, but serves as a foundation for further actions such as process automation, improving process performance, and the identification of potential consequences as
well as the quickness to respond for changes. To this end, it is important to ensure that process models represent the corresponding real world business processes as accurately as possible. In turn, a not proper described business process may lead to ineffectiveness, costs, and even losses. Hence, a focus is set on the quality, granularity
as well as structure of process models. By now, numerous guidelines exist for creating correct and sound process models in respect to their quality, granularity, and resulting structure. However, hardly research addresses cognitive aspects when creating process models. Thereby, cognitive aspects are of particular importance for creating and understanding process models.
This thesis contributes insights from a controlled experiment investigating the influence of psychological distance on the process of process modeling. More precisely, the effects of social distance of a process designer to the modeled domain has on the creation
of process models are evaluated. In this context, the recent and emerging trend of gamification is applied. Therefore, gamification in a 3D virtual world is used to enhance the effects of social distance and for a better reflection of a real world problem.
The final results obtained from the experiment do not agree with the theory. In particular, significant differences between low and high social distance with respect to process model quality, granularity, and structure are observed but are contrary to the stated goal of the experiment. Hence, the findings underline the importance of understanding the effects of cognitive aspects on the process of process modeling. However, the results may provide valuable incitements for enterprises to compose adequate teams for creating or optimizing business process models.