Excellence Hall of Fame

Amy is a world-renowned leadership, teamwork, and organizational learning scholar whose groundbreaking research has revolutionized the way organizations approach learning, teamwork, and innovation. The Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School (a chair established to support the study of human interactions that lead to the creation of successful enterprises which contribute to the betterment of society), she is consistently ranked amongst the top business thinkers globally and has twice been ranked in the top spot.

She grew up in New York before moving to Massachusetts to study Visual and Environmental Studies and Engineering in Harvard. Graduating in 1981, she went to work as Chief Engineer for the architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller in what was to become the Buckminster Fuller Institute. After Fuller’s death in 1983, she committed to writing a book to clarify his technical writing for a broad audience. While writing, she taught high-school algebra and college engineering courses (at the University of Vermont and at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY) filling in for faculty members on leave.  Through this, she gained an initial appreciation of the teaching and writing activities that comprise an academic career. Shifting her focus from engineering to management of complex problem-solving, she went on to serve as Director of Research for the Pecos River Learning Centers in New Mexico, from 1987 to 1990, where she explored the complexities of change in large organizations before returning to Harvard to study for her PhD in Organizational Behavior.

In late 1993, she met George Daley, a physician and scientist (who would later become the Dean of Harvard Medical School) and they were married in the summer of 1995. The following year, she completed her doctorate in Organizational Behavior and joined the faculty at Harvard Business School as an assistant professor in Technology and Operations Management.

Her doctoral research was based on the hypotheses that work teams that with greater psychological safety would engage in more learning behavior and have higher performance.  She tested these hypotheses in a study of 51 teams of four types (management, sales, new product development and production) in a midwestern manufacturing company.  The study built on a prior research project that had a surprise finding.  In that study, she tested the hypothesis that medical teams in hospitals with better teamwork would make fewer mistakes.  Unexpectedly, the data suggested the opposite was true: better teams appear to make more mistakes – a finding which hit her hard, leaving her worrying about how to inform her supervisors (one of whom was the great Chris Argyris) of her “failure” while envisioning herself dropping out of Harvard. It then occurred to her that perhaps the better teams were not making more mistakes but rather were more willing to truthfully report them. Follow on research provided support for this interpretation, which led to the accidental discovery of the concept of “team psychological safety.”  Today, with the benefit of hindsight, the idea that better teams are more transparent in speaking up with bad news is widely accepted.

Her pioneering research has shown that psychological safety – which Rita McGrath (who nominated her) notes she discovered long before Google made the idea mainstream – has arguably been Amy’s most significant contribution to management. She defines it as the belief that you will not be humiliated or punished for voicing concerns, questions or ideas – and has shown that it is essential when fostering a culture of learning and innovation. If team members feel safe to speak up and share their ideas, they are more likely to take risks, experiment, share mistakes, and thus to learn from their experiences. This, in turn, leads to increased creativity, problem-solving, and better team performance.

Amy’s research on teaming, psychological safety, and organizational learning has resulted in numerous award-winning academic and management publications. In 1987, she published her first book A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of Buckminster Fuller making Fuller’s highly technical thinking on nature, systems thinking, and synergetic geometry (a field he pioneered) accessible to a broad audience.

Her other books are Teaming (2012), Teaming to Innovate (2013), Building the Future (2016) co-authored with Susan Salter Reynolds, Extreme Teaming (2017) co-authored with Jean-Francois Harvey, The Fearless Organization (2018), and Right Kind of Wrong which won the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year award in 2023.

She has received numerous other awards and accolades, amongst them an honorary doctorate in 2014 from Maastricht University in the Netherlands, Thinkers50 Talent Award (2017), Purdue University’s first Annual Organizational Behavior and Human Resources Distinguished Scholar Award (2017), London Business school’s 2018 Sumantra Ghoshal Award for Rigour and Relevance in the Study of Management, Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award (2019), and the 2019 Organization Development and Change Distinguished Scholar Award from the Academy of Management. She was named as the most influential thinker in Human Resources by HR Magazine (2019) and has been ranked by the biannual Thinkers50 global list of top management thinkers since 2011, where she has been ranked in top place since 2021 as the world’s most influential management thinker.

Her legacy (in addition to being the mother of two children, Jack and Nicholas) is a lasting and growing impact on the fields of management and leadership, the transformation of our understanding of organizational behavior that is inspiring the creation of more open, inclusive, and innovative workplaces, helping drive the benefits that accompany them.