Teresa Amabile

Teresa Amabile (born 1950) is an American psychologist whose research concerns creativity, intrinsic motivation, innovation and everyday life at work. She trained first as a chemist at Canisius College, then took her doctorate in psychology at Stanford University in 1977, taught at Brandeis University for eighteen years and joined Harvard Business School in 1995, where she held the Edsel Bryant Ford professorship until retiring in 2024. She is best known for the componential theory of creativity, which holds that creative performance arises from domain skills, creativity-relevant processes and intrinsic task motivation shaped by the social environment, and for the consensual assessment technique, in which independent judges rate creative products. With Steven Kramer she described the progress principle, the finding that small wins in meaningful work drive motivation and creativity.