Effectiveness of Role Plays on Process-oriented Behaviour in Daily Work Practices: An Analysis in the Financial Services Sector

We examine whether role plays have the potential to advance process-oriented behaviour (i.e. employees perform their activities while considering other activities and colleagues in the process) of employees in daily work practices. Process-oriented behaviour is difficult to achieve. In our paper we argue that role plays in which participants take over fictitious roles are a promising learning method. However, effects of role plays on subsequent behaviour in daily work practices are missing so far in the literature. Our results from 153 participants of a financial service institution reveal that the role play used has a statistically significant impact on employees’ process-oriented behaviour in terms of their cross-functional coordination, their process knowledge and their continuous process reflection, but not on employees’ process awareness. Given that outcome, we argue that despite the application costs, role plays are beneficial for companies to train their employees in process orientation. Moreover, we show that there is no impact of the penetration level (number of employees trained per department) on the process-oriented behaviour of the individual employee. Hence, every single employee matters. Thus it is not necessary to wait for a company-wide roll-out. Initial pilot projects can be started and employees can be trained independent from their team.