Amy Edmondson

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School and a globally recognized expert on psychological safety, team performance, and organizational learning. She is regarded as one of the most influential management thinkers in the world, consistently ranked in the top two by Thinkers50, with #1 rankings in 2021 and 2023.

Edmondson is the author of eight books and more than 100 peer-reviewed academic articles that have shaped contemporary understanding of how organizations learn and thrive in dynamic environments. Her groundbreaking research on psychological safety—the belief that one can take interpersonal risks in a team without fear of negative consequences—has become essential to how leading organizations build cultures of trust, innovation, and continuous improvement.

Her most recent book, Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well (Atria Books, 2023), won the Financial Times and Schroders Best Business Book of 2023 and is being translated into 27 languages. The book extends her research on psychological safety to provide a practical framework for organizations serious about learning from failure and accelerating innovation. Her 2019 book, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth (Wiley), has been translated into 16 languages and has become a touchstone for leaders seeking to build psychologically safe teams and organizations.

Edmondson’s body of work—including Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate and Compete in the Knowledge Economy(2012), Teaming to Innovate (2013), Extreme Teaming (2017), and Building the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation (2016)—explores the challenges and opportunities of dynamic teamwork across industries and organizational contexts. Her research has been published in the most rigorous academic outlets, including the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, and Organization Science. It has also been published in top management outlets such as Harvard Business Review, and the California Management Review.

Edmondson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024, one of the nation’s most distinguished honors recognizing exceptional scholarship and contributions to society. She has received numerous recognitions for her scholarly impact, including the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award (2019), the Joseph E. McGrath Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Groups (2021), the Institute of Coaching Award for Excellence in Leadership (2021), the Academy of Management Fellowship (2023), the Human Resource Management Review Scholarly Impact Award (2023), and the Sumatra Ghoshal Award for Rigor and Relevance in the Study of Management (2018). She received an Honorary Degree from Maastricht University in The Netherlands (2014).

Edmondson’s research focuses on how leaders create the conditions necessary for learning, innovation, and resilience. She examines how psychological safety enables people to speak up with concerns, questions, and ideas; how effective teaming drives innovation in complex organizational environments; and how organizations can systematically learn from both success and failure. Her work has become foundational to understanding organizational performance in the modern economy.

Edmondson has chaired and taught numerous Harvard Business School Executive Education programs, including the school’s flagship Advanced Management Program (AMP). Her consulting and executive education activities have engaged organizations across industries including healthcare, technology, manufacturing, financial services, and aerospace—helping leaders build the psychological safety and teaming capabilities essential to innovation and performance.

Before her academic career, Edmondson was Director of Research at Pecos River Learning Centers, where she led research on transformational change in large corporations. In the early 1980s, she worked as Chief Engineer for architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller. Her book A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller (Birkhäuser Boston, 1987) makes Fuller’s sophisticated mathematical contributions accessible to non-technical audiences.

Edmondson received her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior, A.M. in Psychology, and A.B. in Engineering and Design from Harvard University.