Thinkers50 Hall of Fame: Teresa Amabile

Transcript

Stuart Crainer:

Hello, I’m Stuart Crainer, co-founder of Thinkers50. Welcome to the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame for 2024, which we present in partnership with the Haier Group. The Hall of Fame comes out every year. It is an opportunity to celebrate the foundational thinkers of modern management. Inductees into the Hall of Fame in recent years have included Don Tapscott, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Margaret Heffernan, Clay Christensen, and a host of others, great figures from modern management thinking. Today I’m delighted to be talking with an inductee into the 2024 Thinkers50 Hall of Fame, Teresa Amabile. Teresa, really nice to see you. We’ve featured your work over the years and you’ve been featured in the Thinkers50 Ranking. Just for people who don’t know your work, it means some great books. You’ve got a book coming out on Retiring; Creativity in Context; Growing Up Creative; The Progress Principle is probably… You’re probably best known for that, I suspect, but what’s the golden thread that links all this work?

Teresa Amabile:

As I look back on my work, really, starting in grad school, in the psychology department at Stanford many years ago, the thread connecting my work is a fascination, a deep fascination with people’s inner lives. What goes on with them psychologically in terms of their motivation, their emotions, their perceptions about what’s going on around them and what it means and how their inner lives influence the way they behave. That characterises every stream of research that I’ve done throughout the years from grad school all the way up through this most recent research on the retirement transition.

Stuart Crainer:

What triggered the interest in the first place? I know that’s difficult to pin down, but was there a Damascene conversion, a sudden moment of an epiphany?

Teresa Amabile:

I think, Stuart, that I’ve always been psychologically minded. That’s a term of art we use in the field. I’ve always enjoyed trying to understand what’s going on inside people’s heads. I realised that I did this even when I was a kid, and there was something that my science teacher in high school saw in me just through conversations we had. I loved science and she taught three of the four main science courses that I took in high school, and she and I had a lot of terrific conversations outside of class. She noticed something in me that I hadn’t noticed in myself at the time. Years later… So, I went into chemistry as an undergraduate. I knew I loved science. I loved the idea of finding answers to questions using systematic methods. I went into chemistry because it was challenging. I’m always up for a big intellectual challenge, and I did well in chemistry and I enjoyed it intellectually, but I realised I didn’t enjoy thinking about it after I left the lab or left the classroom.

And when I took a psychology course just because I needed a social science elective and it fit my schedule, literally, that is how I got into psychology by happenstance of my schedule in college. I was captivated. From the very first week of that first psychology course. I thought, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t realise there was this thing that’s a science, but rather than being about the behaviour of molecules, it’s about the behaviour of human beings,” which I found just intrinsically more fascinating to me. I did finish the chemistry degree because I was so far along in it, but I began to orient myself more towards psychology by taking a few psych classes.

Later when I was in grad school in psychology, I was going through an old memory box of mine and I found an envelope addressed to this science teacher of mine from high school, and she had written on the front of it, “Teresa, I think you might be interested in this.” It was from the American Psychological Association and inside was a booklet, Your Career in Psychology. I had no memory of ever having been given this booklet. I probably looked at it when I got it from her and thought, “Eh, whatever.” It didn’t strike me at the time as something that I would be interested in. I think I didn’t really understand what psychology was. I didn’t understand it was really a science, but she saw something in me. So, I think it goes way back, this fascination with what goes on inside people’s heads.

Stuart Crainer:

But how did you make the leap from that inspiration to Harvard Business School? Because I mean, there’s lots of other routes with psychology that don’t necessarily lead you to a business school.

Teresa Amabile:

Yeah. There were a lot of twists and turns along the way. I started my career at Brandeis University in the psychology department. I had become captivated with curiosity in grad school about creativity. I was curious about how motivational state influenced people’s creative behaviour, and I actually developed a course that I was allowed to teach in my last year in grad school. It was a seminar for upper level undergrads in the psychology department. The course was called The Psychology of Everyday Life, and I believe that I focused primarily on motivation and creativity in that course. I brought in a diverse variety of articles, studies, theoretical pieces on creativity and motivation. That’s because I think I had been really excited by this question, which didn’t seem to have an answer in the psychological literature of the time, and that was the mid-1970s. So I began doing experiments when I was in grad school, controlled laboratory experiments where I controlled the social environment under which people were working.

And by people, I mean I did some studies with children, I did other studies with adults, and I manipulated one aspect of the work environment. Had people under different conditions do a particular task where I could measure the creativity of what they had done afterwards. That was the beginning of several years of lab experiments, which led me to discover several pretty reliable methods for destroying creativity. So, it wasn’t my aim to discover how to kill creativity, but I was able to see that by putting people under conditions where they expected external evaluation of what they were doing, or they expected that they were working for reward in what they were doing or where they believed they were competing with others or where they felt they were under constraint in how they could go about doing what they were doing, all each of those conditions and related conditions led to decrease in creativity because it led to a decrease in intrinsic motivation.

Intrinsic motivation is the desire to do something because it’s interesting, enjoyable, satisfying, personally challenging. And when people are working under what we call extrinsic motivators, extrinsic constraints, they’re less likely to feel intrinsically motivated and their work that they produce is less likely to be judged as creative by independent judges looking at the works of people created under all these different conditions. So that was an important set of findings, and that was the work that I pursued in grad school and in my early years as a professor at Brandeis University in the Psychology Department. I did publish that work, those first years of experimentations in a number of psychological journal articles and in the book that you mentioned previously. May I show it, Stuart?

Stuart Crainer:

Of course.

Teresa Amabile:

The Social Psychology of Creativity, which I revised and updated massively about a dozen years later. It included at that point a lot more research that I had done on creativity, and that book is called Creativity in Context. The first one was published in 1983, and this very different revised version was published in 1996, so that was the body of work that I had been doing. But around the time that that first edition was published, The Social Psychology of Creativity in the early 1980s, I began to feel dissatisfied with the laboratory method. Don’t get me wrong, lab experimentation is wonderful because it allows the researcher to nail down causality, and I love that as a scientist. However, I became very dissatisfied with the extent to which these lab experiments are artificial. The conditions under which I was placing people were somewhat artificially presented, and certainly the tasks that I had them working on were artificial.

They were, for one thing, very short tasks. Few of them were the kinds of things that people do out in the real world, and I started feeling a yearning for looking out what was going on when people were trying to be creative out in the real world. That led me to the Center for Creative Leadership, where I met a wonderful person named Stanley Gryskiewicz. Stan and I began to do some interview studies with R&D scientists who are people trying to be creative for a living essentially, people doing research and development inside organisations, organisations that need creativity from their R&D scientists because they’re trying to develop new products, that are trying to develop new processes. So I thought that this was really fertile territory for understanding how people’s motivational states and other psychological states might be influenced by different work environment conditions and how that might influence their creative behaviour.

So, interview studies, I began publishing these studies. I began doing some survey studies inside organisations. For example, while I was still at Brandeis, I did a study looking at the effective downsizing on the creativity of teams working in research and development. How did that influence the work environment, that atmosphere, downsizing? How did it influence the work environment? How did it influence people’s motivation and how was their creativity affected? And I published those studies, some in psychology journals, some in management journals, and it was that work that attracted the attention of the Harvard Business School. Some of that work actually appeared in Creativity in Context, the book that I just showed, which was published in 1996. So, Harvard Business School invited me to join its faculty, to leave Brandeis where I’d been for 18 years, and to join its faculty in 1995. That opened up a whole new world for my research, and I’d love to talk about that some if you’re interested.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, there’s a lot to unpack there. Because I was trying to fit your work into the management ideas history, and I was thinking of the Hawthorne experiments. So you’ve got the Hawthorne experiments, then you’ve got Maslow, well, you’ve got Elton Mayo, then you’ve got Frederick Herzberg, et cetera. And you fit into that lineage, don’t you?

Teresa Amabile:

Yes. There’s a beautiful little coincidence here. My office for 18 years at Brandeis University was two doors down from the office that had been occupied by Abraham Maslow until a few years before I arrived at Brandeis. My work does fit into that tradition because for example, the Hawthorne experiments, the work by Mayo and colleagues looked inside real organisations and tried to understand how people’s performance was affected by the conditions under which they were working. Those conditions had to do often with the physical environment. I was looking more at the social psychological environment, the kinds of constraints that people were working under or the kinds of support that people were working under, which I was able to discover in the research that I did initially through the Center for Creative Leadership. That work does fall within that general rubric though, of trying to understand what’s happening with the human as they’re trying to perform inside organisations, trying to do their job day by day. Absolutely.

Stuart Crainer:

I say we should say that the Center for Creative Leadership was actually really influential, wasn’t it? Around that time in the eighties and nineties, it really built up a great reputation and had a lot of influence.

Teresa Amabile:

That’s right. The Center for Creative Leadership was doing some of the most important work, some of the most important research being done on human behaviour inside organisations and leadership in terms of the traits of leaders, the habitual behaviours of leaders, but also beginning to look at the kinds of environments that the kinds of cultures that leaders created and how that affected the people trying to work within those organisations. It was an exciting place to be, the Center for Creative Leadership, in the early eighties, which was primarily when I began working there, when I did most of my work there early mid-eighties into the late-1980s. They are also, of course, one of the premier providers of executive education, and it was really through a course that Stan brought me in to teach with him called Creativity for R&D Managers that I met people in companies that then invited me to come in with Stan and carry out these interview studies.

Stuart Crainer:

You’re kind of in Studs Terkel territory, aren’t you? Interview studies?

Teresa Amabile:

Yes. Yeah, a little bit like that. Although coming from my background as an experimental social psychologist, I wasn’t about to stand on the street corner and talk to people who are spending their days out there as Studs Terkel famously did. I wanted to sit down with people one-on-one, and the method initially was to ask them to recall a highly creative event from their recent work experience and just to tell me about it, about what the project was, who was involved in it, what the work environment was like, and just to tell me about that experience, how it unfolded and why they think it ended up with a highly creative result. I also asked them to tell me about a contrasting story, low creativity in their recent work experience. Because the people that I was initially interviewing normally did a number of different projects within a year or two-year period.

And the low creativity project, I said, should have been one where creativity would result ideally where creativity was needed. Some innovative result was supposed to happen, and for whatever reason it just didn’t happen, and tell me about that. Tell me about what the project was, who was involved, what the work environment was like, any particular aspects of that project that you can recall? Any important events that happened in that project? So, I asked the same questions, but about two very contrasting experiences, and it was from those initial interviews that I was able to then develop survey measures. A particular survey measure called KEYS, which assesses aspects of the work environment that we discovered in those interview studies could strongly influence creativity and innovation. I have to say, we had now moved beyond the territory of how to kill creativity. Those interview studies and those survey studies did uncover a number of stimulants to creativity.

Yes, there were obstacles to creativity, and many of them were the kinds of things that I had studied in the lab, like being very focused on external evaluation and how your ideas might get ripped apart, being focused on competition with peers when you’re working, being focused on what you’re going to get, what those rewards are for what you’re doing rather than really zeroing in and getting engaged by the project, the problem itself. Yes, we found lots of obstacles to creativity in organisations, but we also found a number of stimulants, which were often the opposites of those obstacles. So that was really satisfying that itch that had begun to bother me in the early eighties, that dissatisfaction with purely doing lab experiments. I didn’t stop doing experiments at that point, but while I was still at Brandeis, I did begin to orient my work more toward adult creativity and more toward creativity out in the real world.

Oh, I want to mention that as I decided to orient my work more toward adult creativity, I realised that I was putting behind me studying children’s creativity and how it was affected by the circumstances under which they were working, but I wanted to get that research out to people who could really use it. I think I’ve always been oriented toward wanting to do research that was applicable, that could make a difference out in the world. So I thought, “What can I tell parents and teachers that could help them to support children’s creativity and first of all, avoid killing it?” So, I wrote a book as I was wrapping up my research on children’s creativity, and I think you may have mentioned this–Growing Up Creative. I published this in 1989, and it came out a few years after that as a paperback. I wanted parents and teachers to understand how little things that they do at home and in school every day can either undermine or support children’s intrinsic motivation and creativity.

I knew that these people were not going to be reading my journal articles. They were unlikely to read The Social Psychology of Creativity because that book was written primarily for scholars, researchers, and students interested in the psychology of creativity. But I was excited by the reception of that work, by people who could use it, by parents, by teachers, and that was very satisfying. It felt like putting a bow on those years of experimental research on the conditions that could influence children’s creativity. So, there I was making the transition to Harvard Business School in 1995, and I realised when I went to HBS that I would now have the resources and the access to organisations to move my research to a whole new level, to be even more ambitious and to try to tackle a question that had really been haunting me. I knew at a 30,000 foot level how aspects of the work environment could influence people’s motivation and creativity.

I wanted to understand how it happened. How did these creativity-supporting or creativity-killing work environments arise day by day? I wanted to take a microscope and look kind of inside people’s heads, look at their psychological experiences and the events that were influencing them day by day as they were trying to do creative work. That led me to undertake a project that from start to finish was about 15 years, my first 15 years at Harvard Business School. My research team and I undertook a diary study where we had over 200 people working in 26 creative project teams. These are teams that were supposed to be focusing almost a hundred percent of their time on a particular project that required creativity in order to be successful, where they were supposed to be coming up with novel and useful ideas, the definition of creativity.

Many of these were product development projects. Some of them were developing new processes, some of them were solving particularly complex client problems, but creativity was the goal for all of these projects. 26 teams agreed to participate in this study where each person on the team individually every day, Monday through Friday, through the entire course of the project, agreed to fill out an electronic diary form that we emailed them toward the end of the day about that particular day, about their motivations, their emotions, their perceptions at work that day, their perceptions of the work environment among other things. We asked them to briefly describe one event that occurred that day that stood out in their minds, and we said, “It can be anything at all as long as it is relevant to this project, your work on this project.” We spent years analysing the nearly 12,000 daily diary reports we got, and when we unpacked those, when we really were able to wrap our heads and we did many different kinds of analyses, we discovered two really important facts about human creativity inside organisations, and these are novel discoveries.

The first one is that inner work life drives performance. Inner work life is just that combination of motivations, emotions, and perceptions, that constant stream of psychological experience that we all have every day while we’re working. Inner work life drives four aspects of performance, creativity, productivity, commitment to the work and collegiality. That is the way in which people interact with their colleagues, working with them on a team. We found that to the extent that people had better inner work life experiences on a given day and a given week, a given month, they were more likely to be creative and productive and demonstrate higher commitment to their work and be better colleagues to each other, which in turn, of course supported the work that everybody else on the team was doing. So that was the first discovery. Then we said, “All right, if inner work life drives performance, what drives inner work life?” And that was the second big discovery.

That is of all the things that can happen in a given day that can lead to positive inner work life, the single most important is simply making progress in meaningful work. Making progress in meaningful work. The opposite also holds true of all of the negative things that can happen in a given day at work that can lead to negative inner work life. The single most prominent is experiencing a setback in the work. So, this is the research that was the basis for a number of journal articles, Harvard Business Review articles, and a book which I published.

My co-author in most of this, and certainly in the book–The Progress Principle–was Steven Kramer, my collaborator in this work and also my husband. So, that research I think, and that book was able to help leaders, managers, and individual contributors all over the world better manage the work environment for positive inner work life and better support creativity and productivity at work. So that was very exciting. That was very rewarding, to see this research and this book have a positive impact on so many people that I’ve talked to since the book was published in 2011, people who have really used research and its findings and its implications in their everyday work.

Stuart Crainer:

Right. It’s interesting looking back, Teresa, that a few things that are often taken for granted now. For instance, actually talking to managers and people doing jobs as the research methodology has been slightly underused. I can give Henry Mintzberg’s The Nature of Managerial Work one of the few instances, so actually talking to people. But the people you were talking to initially, people in R&D, are now fated and celebrated massively, especially if they’re based in Silicon Valley, but at that time they weren’t really. They were there as kind of corporate functionaries really, so you kind of brought them to the fore. And also, when you joined HBS in 1995, the stuff you were talking about researching, like creativity and innovation, weren’t very fashionable in 1995 when everybody was talking about reengineering and downsizing.

Teresa Amabile:

That’s right. In fact, I had some difficulty publishing my initial studies on creativity in organisations because it was a topic that hadn’t appeared much in Managerial Sciences, Organisational Behaviour… the journals that I was primarily trying to publish in. It was seen as kind of a strange topic, and actually I encountered that in trying to publish my initial studies in the psychology journals because psychology had been dominated by studies of creative individuals. What are their personality traits and how are they different from all the rest of us? And my approach was to say, “You know what? I think everyone can do creative work.” Certainly we have different capacities, different levels of creativity that we’re capable of for a whole bunch of different reasons, but I believe that the work environment can make a big difference in the extent to which our creative potential is realised. So that was an odd idea in psychology when I first started publishing it.

And you’re absolutely right, the focus in management and management research in the eighties and the nineties was so much more on efficiency and yes, downsizing and cost-cutting than it was on creativity and innovation. It’s hard to find a corporate mission statement now that doesn’t include something about creativity and or innovation. Sometimes I’m afraid it’s lip service more than anything else, but at that time you didn’t hear it. You really didn’t hear it. I like to think that the research that my team and I did and the research being done by some other really terrific researchers going against the mainstream, did result in a much wider recognition in management circles. The importance of creativity and innovation to the health of an organisation, and certainly to its sustainability,

Stuart Crainer:

And certainly the notion of making progress in meaningful work, it resonates in 2024 and I’m sure in years to come much more than it’s ever done before I think. Our understanding of that is much greater now,

Teresa Amabile:

I think so. I believe when I first started telling executive audiences about the findings of The Progress Principle, this is before we had even written the book, I sometimes got a puzzled look. I think that many managers, when they heard it thought, sort of, “Well, big deal.” Of course, yeah, people feel good when they make progress in their work. I just suspected that they didn’t understand how important it was in motivating people. In fact, our diary study showed that it was the number one motivator day by day when people were doing their work. So, Steve and I ran a survey study of nearly 700 leaders, managers at different levels. This is from companies all around the world, and we asked them to rank order five employee motivators in terms of the extent to which they thought these were powerful motivators. We of course included progress in there, making progress in the work. We knew that was number one.

We also included the usual suspects of rewards for performance and recognition, clear goals in the work, the usual suspects for motivating people. We found that not only was progress not ranked number one, it was ranked number five across these nearly 700 managers. In fact, only 5% of these managers gave it the number one ranking. If they had been doing their choices randomly, for heaven’s sake, 20% should have ranked it first, right? No, 5%. So, we looked at that and we said, “All right, this explains why we saw so many instances of managers either managing at the team level or managing at higher levels.”

In this diary study, people reporting that their managers were not supporting their progress by doing seemingly obvious things like yes, giving them clear goals, but at the same time giving them appropriate levels of autonomy and how to achieve those goals in the work, like providing them with access to information and resources that they really needed to make progress in the work. Kind of management one-on-one things. We were baffled by why managers weren’t doing this, and I think it’s because they just really didn’t realise how important that steady day-to-day progress, even small wins, even incremental steps forward, how important that is for maintaining people’s intrinsic motivation and positive emotions and drive to do great work.

Stuart Crainer:

One final question, Teresa, your latest book looks at retiring, and I don’t think you’re the retiring type, but you’ve written a book with co-authors about retiring. Can you tell us a bit about that book and the genesis of it and what the big message is?

Teresa Amabile:

Yes. I’m really excited about this new book. I don’t have the book yet because it’s not going to be released until October 2nd, but this is what the cover looks like. It’s called Retiring: Creating a Life That Works for You. When I finished The Progress Principle and I was thinking about what my next research program would be, I knew it would be big. I knew it would be a long term project. I was looking for something that really would be fascinating to me, would focus on of course, people’s inner lives, their experiences and how they were affected by the circumstances surrounding them and how they behaved in response. I kept going back to a question that kind of haunted me from The Progress Principle research, and that was if progress in meaningful work is so important to people’s inner lives, what happens when they leave that meaningful work behind?

I think my wondering about that was probably in part prompted by the fact that I was thinking, “Okay, I’ll probably be retiring myself leaving my meaningful work at Harvard Business School sometime in the coming decade.” So, that was the impetus for the research on the retirement transition. I looked into the literature and found that there was a lot on the financial aspects of retiring and how important health and wealth are, especially wealth to retirement decisions and attitudes and retirement experiences. I wanted to go beyond that. I wanted to understand a lot more about the psychological experiences that people went through, the relational issues and the life restructuring issues that people experienced and that they effected while they were going through the retirement transition. So with my wonderful colleagues, Tim Hall, Kathy Kram, Lotte Bailyn and Marcy Crary, I set out to do a massive interview study.

We interviewed 120 people and focused especially on 14 people who happened to be about to retire when we started our study. We asked those 14 if they would allow us to interview them repeatedly as they approached retirement, went through the transition and lived their first few years in retirement. So these 14 people who agreed to do this with us, we call our stars because we feature prominently their stories in the book. Of course, we draw on all of our research, all of the interviews that we did to come to the conclusions we do in the book. But what we found was absolutely fascinating. I think a lot of it is surprising.

One surprising insight is that we think we’re leaving work when we retire, but retiring well, having a smooth retirement transition and ending up in a satisfying retirement life actually takes work itself. That is the kind of work that you need to do. We discovered four tasks that people have to engage in, in order to affect that kind of retirement transition. It can be very enjoyable work, it can be exciting, but it’s also challenging. And we identified a number of challenges that people face as they go through each of those tasks that they have to engage in order to retire well, and we tell the stories of how people met those challenges.

For most of our people, it went really well. It was pretty smooth, but for some, not so much. Those stories, all of them, are really instructive, I think. And we’re so excited about sharing this research and helping people who are thinking about retiring and also helping people who have loved ones who may be contemplating retirement or having difficulty in their retirement transition. So, that’s what we’re trying to accomplish with this book. Talk about the insights that we gained and talk about how people can use this work to lead into and lead better retirement lives.

Stuart Crainer:

Teresa, we’re out of time. Brilliant conversation in that work life really does drive performance. Making progress in meaningful work perhaps sums up your career because you really have made progress in these crucial issues, which I think we all take for granted now as important issues, but weren’t taken for granted when you started writing about them and researching them. So, thank you very much for all that work and the legacy you’ve left behind. If people want to find out more about Teresa’s work, check out teresaamabile.com. I’ve got more information there and the books are all still available and the new book about retirement is out now. Thank you, Teresa.

Teresa Amabile:

Thank you so much Stuart, and thank you for this honour.