PERSON
Teresa Amabile
The Harvard Business School psychologist who spent four decades establishing the empirical reality of creativity’s conditions—and who, in 2020, called directly on her field to study exactly what AI has since confirmed: that the same tool can be the greatest
amplifier of human creative capacity or its most sophisticated suppressor, depending on whether it is deployed in ways that protect or erode intrinsic motivation.
Teresa Amabile’s
componential theory of creativity—first published in 1983 and refined across four decades of controlled experiments, diary studies, and field research at Harvard Business School—is the most empirically validated framework for understanding what makes creative work possible. Creativity requires three conditions simultaneously: domain-relevant skills, creativity-relevant cognitive processes, and intrinsic task motivation. Remove any one and the stool collapses. Her landmark finding—that the expectation of evaluation reliably decreases creative output, that external pressure produces more volume and less originality—was counterintuitive enough to generate resistance and robust enough to replicate across cultures, age groups, and creative domains. Her 1998
Harvard Business Review essay “How to Kill Creativity” became one of the most-read articles in the publication’s history because it named what every manager who optimizes for volume at the cost of originality