Do innovation requirements always boost innovation? The moderating influence of creative Self-Efficacy

Organizations worldwide adopt innovation job requirements to promote employee creativity and novel ways of working. However, empirical findings on the relationship between innovation job requirements and employee innovation remain inconclusive and often contradictory. This inconsistency hampers organizations’ efforts to design such requirements in ways that maximize benefits while minimizing risks. To address this issue, we apply the Job Demands-Resources model to investigate the double‐edged effect of innovation job requirements and creative self‐efficacy as a critical boundary condition. Data from 354 subordinates and 80 supervisors in a large Chinese firm support our model. Our results show that innovation job requirements stimulate employees’ work engagement, thereby enhancing innovative performance (motivational process), and precipitate employees’ job burnout, thereby undermining innovative performance (health-impairment process). Moreover, employees’ creative self‐efficacy strengthens the motivational process and attenuates the health‐impairment process. These findings enrich the understanding of innovation job requirements and provide practical insights for fostering workplace innovation.