PERSON
Teresa Amabile
Harvard Business School professor (b. 1950) whose four-decade program on creativity established the empirical reality of intrinsic motivation's superiority for creative work — and whose findings are among the foundations of Pink's framework.
Teresa Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration Emerita at Harvard Business School whose research on creativity in context has shaped how organizations understand innovation for four decades. Her foundational studies demonstrated that artists whose motivation was intrinsic produced work judged more creative by expert panels than artists whose motivation was extrinsic — a finding that held across domains, populations, and measurement methods. Her componential theory of creativity identified three required components: domain-relevant skills, creativity-relevant processes, and task motivation — with intrinsic task motivation being the most malleable and most consequential component. Amabile's work provides the empirical backbone for Pink's claim that Type I behavior produces superior outcomes for heuristic work.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Amabile's 1983 experiments using the consensual assessment technique established the methodology for measuring creativity across domains without reducing it to predetermined criteria — expert panels evaluate products holistically, producing creativity scores with high inter-rater reliability.
Her studies with commissioned artists