Amy Edmondson

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School. She teaches and writes on leadership, teaming and organizational learning, and her articles appear in management publications such as Harvard Business Review and California Management Review as well as in top academic journals. She is best known for her pioneering work on psychological safety, which helped spawn a large body of academic research in management, healthcare, and education over the past 15 years. The topic only recently gained widespread popular attention in the business press and social media after a February 2016 New York Times Magazine article described psychological safety as the key factor in determining team performance at Google.

Edmondson’s 2011 book Teaming: How organizations learn, innovate and compete in the knowledge economy explores teamwork in dynamic work environments. Her current work examines teaming across organizations and sectors to build a better future. Extreme Teaming: Lessons in complex, cross-sector leadership (Emerald, 2017) builds on her 2016 case study of a smart-city start up Building the future: Big teaming for audacious innovation, (Berrett-Koehler, 2016).

Before her academic career, Edmondson was Director of Research at Pecos River Learning Centers, where she worked on transformational change in large companies. In the early 1980s, she worked as Chief Engineer for architect/inventor Buckminster Fuller, and her book A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller (Birkauser Boston, 1987) clarifies Fuller’s mathematical contributions for a non-technical audience. Edmondson received her PhD in organizational behavior, AM in psychology, and AB in engineering and design, all from Harvard University.