Development of Leadership Behavior in MMOG: An Empirical Study on Peer Motivation to Lead

By recognizing the Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG) may provide a socially-oriented gaming environment necessary for motivating, developing and training of corporate leadership in current and future enterprises, this proposal aims to bring together leadership and MMOG research to examine peer-motivation factors affecting individual’s leadership behavior over time that is under-researched.This project theoretically extends motivation factors from self to peer level, proposes two new constructs, peer intrinsic motivation to lead, and peer extrinsic motivation to lead, and examines their effects on leadership behaviors (i.e. transactional and transformation leadership) in the context of a MMOG game, using a longitudinal multi-method protocol including observation, content analysis, self-report survey and interview.In addition to the theoretical advances in understanding the conjunction of the leadership and MMOG research from the psychological perspective, this project has important practical implications to business managers and game developers on the potential use of MMOG in business enterprises.