GRACE under pressure: Teresa Amabile

Teresa M. Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration, Emerita, at Harvard Business School. Her most recent book, Retiring: Creating a Life That Works for You, presents insights from a decade of research on the psychological, social, and life restructuring challenges of retiring. Her colleagues Lotte Bailyn, Marcy Crary, Douglas T. Hall, and Kathy E. Kram collaborated on that work. Before turning her research interests to the retirement transition, Teresa devoted over 40 years to researching creativity and innovation. She was instrumental in establishing the social psychology of creativity – the study of how the social environment can influence creative behavior, primarily by influencing motivation. Her research on creativity appears in her books, Creativity in Context and Growing Up Creative, as well as numerous articles for scholars and practitioners. Extending that research, she studied how everyday life inside organizations can influence people and their creativity, productivity, commitment, and collegiality, by affecting inner work life – the confluence of motivation, emotions, and perceptions. The findings of that research appear in her coauthored book (with Steven Kramer), The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. 

Teresa’s work has appeared in over 100 scholarly journal articles and a variety of other outlets, including Harvard Business Review, as well as several edited books. She has presented her work to audiences in a variety of settings, including Pixar, Genentech, TEDx Atlanta, Apple, Pfizer, and The World Economic Forum in Davos. She consults to companies and nonprofits and has served on a number of boards. She has received a variety of awards, including the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Management’s Organizational Behavior Division, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Israel Organizational Behavior Conference, an honorary doctorate from BI Norwegian Business School, and election to the 2024 Thinkers50 Hall of Fame. www.retiringbook.com