Teresa Amabile

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Teresa M. Amabile, born June 15, 1950, is an American professor at Harvard Business School. She holds the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit. She is best known for her work on creativity and how everyday work life affects people and performance. Although she started as a chemist, she earned a PhD in psychology from Stanford in 1977.

Her research focuses on creativity, productivity, innovation, and inner work life—the mix of emotions, perceptions, and motivation people feel as they respond to work events.

Her book The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work (2011) summarizes much of her work and was written with her husband, Steven Kramer.

Amabile has published more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters in top psychology and management journals. She also wrote The Work Preference Inventory and KEYS to Creativity and Innovation.

She has worked with many organizations to apply her ideas, including Procter & Gamble, Novartis, Motorola, IDEO, and the Creative Education Foundation. She has spoken at places like the World Economic Forum in Davos and the Front End of Innovation conference, and she gave a TED Talk for TEDxAtlanta on The Progress Principle.

At Harvard, she teaches MBA and executive courses on managing for creativity, leadership, and ethics. Earlier, she taught at Brandeis University and hosted the PBS series Against All Odds: Inside Statistics.

She is the author of The Progress Principle, Creativity in Context, and Growing Up Creative, along with many papers and presentations. She serves on the editorial boards of Creativity Research Journal, Creativity and Innovation Management, and the Journal of Creative Behavior, and has published articles in Harvard Business Review.

Amabile has received several awards, including the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award in Organizational Behavior from the Academy of Management; the 2017 Distinguished Scholar Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology; the 2005 Best Paper Award from the Center for Creative Leadership; and the 1998 E. Paul Torrance Award from the National Association for Gifted Children.