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Knowledge innovation has become an important source of sustainable competitive advantage for organizations, enabling them to adapt to global competition and environmental uncertainty (Qu et al., 2015). It is an important value-addition for organizations and a key factor for regional economic development (Zou & Zhu, 2020). Based on knowledge investment and experience accumulation (Gergana & Durisin, 2007), knowledge innovation generates new technologies, new approaches, and new methods through knowledge acquisition, stimulation, sharing, collision, and integration. It is also the result of complex interaction of people at the individual-, team-, and organizational level (Peng et al., 2015). Organizations attempt to promote knowledge innovation by taking various measures, such as encouraging knowledge sharing, improving individuals’ positive attitudes, and enhancing team atmosphere (Tsai et al., 2020; Walumbwa et al., 2011).
Prior research has confirmed the impact of psychological contract, leadership style, personal characteristics, and team atmosphere on knowledge innovation (Bilian et al., 2016; Deas & Coetzee, 2020; Wu et al., 2020, 2021). In particular, the influence of individual psychology on knowledge innovation behavior has been widely studied (Van & Meyers, 2015). However, the mechanism underlying this influence is not clear. Moreover, conclusions about the relationship between emotions and innovation are inconsistent (Davis, 2007). This is partly because of the different theoretical perspectives, but more importantly because researchers have failed to effectively test the boundary conditions between emotions and innovation. George and Zhou (2002) pointed out that the influence of emotions on innovation is dependent on specific conditions (George & Zhou, 2002). Some scholars have also emphasized that innovative behavior is the result of interaction between the psychological and situational factors of the individual (Sun & Van, 2015). Notwithstanding these findings, even from this perspective, there are issues that need to be further clarified, such as the internal transmission mechanism of the influence of emotions on individual knowledge and its boundary conditions. This hinders the development of relevant studies in psychology and restricts practical exploration in the field of management as well.
In practice, many innovative solutions and ideas are generated through knowledge transfer, knowledge exchange, and knowledge sharing (Liu et al., 2021). Some scholars have pointed out that knowledge sharing of employees is directly related to their innovation ability (Tu et al., 2016). In particular, employees who are good at sharing their tacit knowledge with others may perform better in terms of innovativeness (Lu & Liang, 2009). As such, knowledge sharing is important to individual knowledge acquisition and innovation (Liang et al., 2016). In this sense, an individual’s ability to obtain the new knowledge and break their own knowledge barriers through knowledge sharing is a necessary condition for innovation. For the above reasons, this paper uses knowledge sharing as a mediating variable.