Teresa Amabile

Teresa Amabile is a Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School. Originally educated and employed as a chemist, Teresa received her Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University. Her current research investigates how people approach and experience the transition to retirement. Previously, her 45-year program of research on how the work environment can influence creativity and motivation yielded a theory of creativity and innovation; methods for assessing creativity, motivation, and the work environment; and a set of prescriptions for maintaining and stimulating innovation. More recently, she researched and published on how life inside organizations can influence people and their performance. Her current research program focuses on psychological and social aspects of the retirement transition.

Teresa’s work has earned several awards: the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Management’s OB Division (2018); the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (2017); the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Israel Organizational Behavior Conference (2018); the Center for Creative Leadership Best Paper Award (in Leadership Quarterly) (2005); and the Torrance Award from the National Association for Gifted Children (1998). In 2020, she was named one of the top 50 scholars, by citation count, in business/management (PLOS Biology). She has presented her theories, research results, and practical implications to various groups in business, government, and education, including Apple, IDEO, Procter & Gamble, Roche Pharma, Genentech, TEDx Atlanta,the Society for Human Resource Management, and Pfizer. In addition to participating in various executive programs at Harvard Business School, she created the MBA course Managing for Creativity, and has taught several courses to first-year MBA students. Teresa was the host/instructor of Against All Odds: Inside Statistics, a 26-part instructional series originally produced for broadcast on PBS. She is a director of Seaman Corporation, and has served on the boards of other organizations.

Teresa is the author of The Progress Principle, Creativity in Context, and Growing Up Creative, as well as over 150 scholarly papers, chapters, case studies, and presentations. She serves on the editorial boards of Creativity Research Journal, Creativity and Innovation Management, and Journal of Creative Behavior. Her papers include: Creativity (Annual Review of Psychology); Deep Help in Complex Project Work: Guiding and Path-clearing across Difficult Terrain (Academy of Management Journal); The Downside of Downtime: The Prevalence and Work Pacing Consequences of Idle Time at Work (Journal of Applied Psychology); Leader Behaviors and the Work Environment for Creativity: Perceived Leader Support (Leadership Quarterly); and Affect and Creativity at Work (Administrative Science Quarterly). She has also published several articles in Harvard Business Review.

PUBLICATIONS

BOOKS

• Amabile, Teresa M., and Steve J. Kramer. The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. Harvard Business Review Press, 2011. View Details
• Amabile, T. M. Creativity in Context. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. View Details
• Amabile, T. M. Growing Up Creative. New York: Crown, 1989. View Details
• Hennessey, Beth A., and T. M. Amabile. Creativity and Learning. Washington, D.C.: National Education Association, 1987. View Details
• Amabile, T. M. The Social Psychology of Creativity. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1983. View Details
• Amabile, T. M. and M. L. Stubbs, eds. Psychological Research in the Classroom: Issues for Educators and Researchers. New York: Pergamon Press, 1982. View Details

AWARDS & HONORS

• Received an Honorary Doctorate from Handelshøyskolen BI (the BI Norwegian School of Management) in Oslo in 2019.
• Winner of the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management for her pioneering work on creativity in organizations.
• Winner of the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Israel Organizational Behavior Conference in Tel Aviv.
• Recipient of the 2017 Distinguished Scholar Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, a division of the American Psychological Association.
• “How Leaders Kill Meaning at Work” (with Steven J. Kramer) was ranked by readers as the second most popular article of 2012 in the McKinsey Quarterly.
• Ranked on the 2011 and 2013 Thinkers50 list—the definitive listing of the world’s top 50 business thinkers.
• Received the Doctor of Humane Letters, Honoris Causa, from Canisius College in 1997.
• Named one of the top 50 scholars, by total citation count, in business/management, by the journal PLOS Biology (2020).