Domain knowledge and role clarity moderate the relationship between proactive personality and employee radical creativity

This study explored the influence of proactive personality on employee radical creativity along with the role of teams’ domain knowledge and employees’ role clarity as moderators of this relationship. We distributed a survey to obtain data from 290 supervisor–employee dyads in China, and tested our hypotheses via a conditional process analysis. The results show that the moderating effect of domain knowledge on the positive relationship between proactive personality and employee radical creativity was nonsignificant. However, role clarity had a significant moderating effect on the moderating role of domain knowledge in the relationship between proactive personality and employee radical creativity; that is to say, the relationship between proactive personality and radical creativity was most strongly positive when both teams’ domain knowledge and employees’ role clarity were at a high level. These findings are discussed in terms of their theoretical and practical significance.