Teresa Amabile (born in 1950) is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School.
When people believe that every move they make is going to affect their compensation, they tend to get risk averse.
If the challenge is far beyond their skill level, they tend to get frustrated; if it's far below their skill level, they tend to get bored. Leaders need to strike the right balance.
Most people aren't anywhere near to realizing their creative potential, in part because they're laboring in environments that impede intrinsic motivation.
People will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction and challenge of the work itself.
If you facilitate your subordinates' steady progress in meaningful work, make that progress salient to them, and treat them well, they will experience the emotions, motivations, and perceptions necessary for great performance.
People are most creative when they care about their work and they're stretching their skills.
To be creative, an idea must also be appropriate - useful and actionable. It must somehow influence the way business gets done by improving a product, for instance, or by opening up a new way to approach a process.
People can certainly be creative when they're under the gun, but only when they're able to focus on the work.
The successful implementation of creative ideas within an organization.
Creativity depends on a number of things: experience, including knowledge and technical skills; talent; an ability to think in new ways; and the capacity to push through uncreative dry spells.
The best way to help people to maximize their creative potential is to allow them to do something they love.
Creativity is the generation and initial development of new, useful ideas. Innovation is the successful implementation of those ideas in an organization. Thus, no innovation is possible without the creative processes that mark the front end of the process: identifying important problems and opportunities, gathering relevant information, generating new ideas, and exploring the validity of those ideas.
Track your small wins to motivate big accomplishments.
One day's happiness often predicts the next day's creativity.
The desire to do something because you find it deeply satisfying and personally challenging inspires the highest levels of creativity, whether it's in the arts, sciences, or business.
To be creative, an idea must also be appropriate—useful and actionable.
Creativity takes a hit when people in a work group compete instead of collaborate.
True creativity is impossible without some measure of passion.
People are the least creative when fighting the clock. . . Time pressure stifles creativity because people can't deeply engage with the problem.