Baker Foundation Professor, Harvard Business School

Teresa M. Amabile is a Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School. As a corporate advisor and director, her distinctive contribution is insight into the impact of organizational changes and managerial actions on the retention, engagement, and performance of knowledge workers, particularly those in R&D. Her goal is to foster the creativity, productivity, and innovation required to create significant value.

Originally educated and employed as a chemist, Teresa received her Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University. An internationally recognized expert on the creativity and productivity of knowledge workers, she is widely respected for her work on innovation and the organizational conditions that facilitate individual motivation, creative productivity, and well-being. Her decades of research have yielded methods for assessing creativity, productivity, motivation, and the work environment, as well as a set of prescriptions for maintaining and stimulating innovation.


At Harvard Business School, she has served in several leadership positions, including member of the Dean’s Operating Group, advising the Dean on all matters of strategic importance to HBS; Senior Associate Dean and head of the Division of Research; and unit head of Entrepreneurial Management.

Teresa Amabile

Teresa Amabile

Teresa has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management, the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Israel Organizational Behavior Conference. She has twice been named to the Thinkers 50, a biennial list of the most influential business thinkers worldwide. She is the author of The Progress Principle, named one of the best business books of 2011 by The Washington Post, as well as Creativity in Context and over 150 papers, chapters, case studies, and presentations. She has worked with and presented the managerial implications of her research to various groups in business, government, and education, including the World Economic Forum, Apple, Pixar, Google, IDEO, Johnson & Johnson, Genentech, Grunenthal Pharma, Novartis, TEDx Atlanta, Harvard Medical School, the Society for Human Resource Management, and Pfizer. Amabile created the MBA course Managing for Creativity at HBS, and has taught thousands of MBA, executive, and doctoral students. She was the host/instructor of Against All Odds: Inside Statistics, a 26-part instructional series originally produced for broadcast on PBS.

Teresa has been a director of Seaman Corporation for 25 years, serving on the Leadership and Compensation Committee as well as the Innovation and Technology Committee. She has also served on the boards of Canisius College, Harvard Business Publishing Company, and the Creative Education Foundation.