Abstract
Literature on knowledge recombination has largely focused on inventors’ access to knowledge components to be recombined as a key determinant of their inventive performance. Research from psychology has shown that openness and extraversion, two personality traits, increase performance in tasks akin to knowledge recombination. We investigate how personality traits shape invention outcomes conditional on organizational knowledge context. We derive personality measures from a survey of 1,327 inventors and combine them with patent-based indicators of inventive performance. Our findings reveal how the relationship between personality and inventive output is moderated by knowledge context: the positive relationship between openness and invention output is stronger if organizational knowledge diversity is low. In contrast, extraversion negatively relates to invention output, but its effect is positively moderated by knowledge diversity.