Teresa M. Amabile

Extensive research shows that when employees get hands-on managerial support, they perform better than when they’re left to their own devices, but unnecessary or unwanted help can be demoralizing and counterproductive. So how do you intervene constructively?

The authors share three key lessons learned during 10 years of study: (1) Step in only when people are engaged in a challenging task and ready to accept help; (2) clarify that your role is to offer assistance, not take over the project or judge anyone; and (3) align the rhythm of your involvement to employees’ needs, determining whether the situation calls for intensive guidance in the short term or intermittent path clearing over a prolonged period. These strategies are especially valuable for helping teams that are physically separated, as so many are during the current pandemic.

Academic researchers now have free access to data from Teresa Amabile’s daily diary study of 200+ professionals working on 26 creative projects in 7 companies in 3 industries. These data cover topics such as motivation, emotion, work environment, creativity, and productivity.  Diary data were collected each weekday throughout the life of the projects or discrete project phases – over 4 months on average, and up to 9 months; the response rate was 75%. Most projects involved new product development. Publications based on the data have included the book The Progress Principle, as well as several scholarly journal articles, practitioner articles, and case studies. The database includes detailed coding of “event of the day” stories from the nearly 12,000 diary submissions, as well as quantitative measures of psychological state collected daily; performance ratings collected from close colleagues and supervisors monthly; and demographics, personality, motivational orientation, cognitive style, perceptions of the work environment, and other measures, collected at other times during the study. Look for the Daily Diary Study database on Harvard University’s Dataverse platform:  http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/25463

Teresa Amabile draws from her new book The Progress Principle to explain how companies can overcome the "crisis of disengagement" occurring in the workplace.

By  Teresa M. Amabile, and Steven J. Kramer.

Harvard Business Review Press, 2011.

The most effective managers have the ability to build a cadre of employees who have great inner work lives-consistently positive emotions; strong motivation; and favorable perceptions of the organization, their work, and their colleagues. The worst managers undermine inner work life, often unwittingly. As Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer explain in The Progress Principle, seemingly mundane workday events can make or break employees' inner work lives. But it's forward momentum in meaningful work-progress-that creates the best inner work lives. Through rigorous analysis of nearly 12,000 diary entries provided by 238 employees in seven companies, the authors explain how managers can foster progress and enhance inner work life every day. The book shows how to remove obstacles to progress, including meaningless tasks and toxic relationships. It also explains how to activate two forces that enable progress: 1) catalysts-events that directly facilitate project work, such as clear goals and autonomy and 2) nourishers-interpersonal events that uplift workers, including encouragement and demonstrations of respect and collegiality. Filled with stories from the companies studied, The Progress Principle equips aspiring and seasoned leaders alike with the insights they need to maximize their people's performance.

In this New York Times opinion piece, Teresa Amabile and coauthor Steven Kramer outline actions that business leaders can take to reignite passion for work and revitalize creative productivity even in tough economic times.

In this article, authors Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer seek to help C-suite managers understand the traps that can impair the productivity of their workforce. By identifying the issues that regularly challenge the efficiency and creativity of employees, the authors aim to help leaders provide meaningful goals while avoiding four costly traps that can have negative effects on the inner work lives and performance of their employees. 

My current major research program is the Retirement Transitions Study: a broad study of retiring professionals' everyday experiences, including identification with work; identity stability, change, and development; meaningfulness of work; changes in life structure, key relationships, and involvement in creative activity; and the role that these experiences (as well as other factors) play in attitudes toward and experiences during retirement. The purpose is to discover how people think and feel about their work experiences across the lifespan, how they make the decision to retire, what forms the transition process takes, how people and their lives change during the process, and what influences successful adjustment to retirement. Our data collection uses multiple methods, including surveys, daily diaries, and extensive semi-structured interviews. We have collected data from current and retired employees in three companies, in four broad groups: (a) employees in the first 5-10 years of their careers; (b) employees in the last 5-10 years of their careers; (c) employees with a planned retirement date in the coming 12 months (interviewed several times as they approached and moved through the retirement transition, and settled into retirement life); and (d) retirees of those companies, who retired in the previous few years. Our research team endeavors to contribute new insights that will be valuable to scholars, organizational leaders, and individual employees as they move through and past their careers. The research team includes Lotte Bailyn (MIT Sloan), Kathy Kram and Tim Hall (BU Questrom School of Management), Marcy Crary (Bentley University), Jeff Steiner (Harvard Business School doctoral candidate), and Debra Rowcroft  (Harvard Business School research associate). To date, we have produced two papers based on this work: a Guidepost Commentary on the importance of qualitative research on retirement, published in the journal Work, Aging, and Retirement (2019), and a paper on our methodology (Amabile & Hall), (2019) in Academy of Management Perspectives.

This research focuses on collaboration and helping in creative project teams. Colin Fisher (UCL), Julianna Pillemer (NYU Stern School), and I developed a multi-year research program examining help received and given, including successful and unsuccessful helping episodes, inside a creative design firm. One paper from this research program appeared in the Academy of Management Journal (2018). A second paper is currently under development. In 2014, we published a Harvard Business Review article on this topic. A second Harvard Business Review article appeared in 2021.

Starting in 2016, I undertook several new projects on creativity and innovation. The first, a revision of my 1988 componential theory of creativity and innovation, was coauthored with Michael Pratt (Boston College) and published in Research in Organizational Behavior (online, 2016; print, 2017). The second, a brief reflection on three forms of creativity evident in everyday life, appeared in 2017 in the Journal of Creative Behavior. The third, a novel theory of how two creative processes can appear under different sets of conditions, coauthored with former HBS doctoral student Johnathan Cromwell (currently on the faculty of the University of San Francisco), was published in 2018 as a chapter in Individual Creativity in the Workplace. The fourth, an essay on the importance of intrinsic motivation and the social environment for creativity, appeared in 2018 as a chapter in The Nature of Human Creativity. The fifth, an essay on the significance of the classic Graham Wallas book (1926) The Art of Thought for contemporary theory and research on the creative process, was published in a 2019 edited book on contributions of the pre-1950 creativity literature (The Creativity Reader). The sixth, on the applicability of my research to real-world problems, appeared in Perspectives on Psychological Science (2019). The seventh, on creativity and artificial intelligence, was published in 2020 in Academy of Management Discoveries.