Understanding When and Why Team Reflexivity Fosters Innovation: The Roles of Member Compliance and Knowledge Integration Capability

Drawing on the knowledge integration perspective, this study examines when and why team reflexivity is associated with team innovation. Based on the inconsistent findings regarding the reflexivity–team innovation link, we identify an internal follow‐through tendency that facilitates this process: compliance of team members, conceptualized as a team's shared tendency to follow agreed rules, procedures, and normative expectations. Building on the insight that innovation benefits from teams' capability to integrate diverse information and perspectives, we argue that team reflexivity is more likely to strengthen knowledge integration capability, and in turn, be associated with higher team innovation when compliance of team members is high. Results from 99 teams support this moderated mediation account. By highlighting this team‐internal implementation condition and explicating the capability‐based mechanism, this study advances the understanding of when and why team reflexivity promotes team innovation.