Bootlegging Innovation as a Pathway to Sustainable Competitive Advantage: The Roles of Job Crafting, Psychological Capital, and Promotion Focus

In dynamic organizational environments, employee-driven bootlegging innovation has emerged as an important micro-level pathway to sustainable competitive advantage. Drawing on self-determination theory, conservation of resources theory, and regulatory focus theory, this study examines how job crafting facilitates bootlegging innovation through psychological capital and how promotion focus conditions this process. Using a two-wave survey of 370 employees from multiple industries in China, we found that job crafting is positively associated with bootlegging innovation both directly and indirectly via psychological capital. Mediation analyses indicate that psychological capital significantly transmits the effect of job crafting on bootlegging innovation. Moreover, promotion focus strengthens the positive relationship between job crafting and psychological capital as well as the relationship between psychological capital and bootlegging innovation, resulting in a stronger conditional indirect effect at higher levels of promotion focus. These findings conceptualize psychological capital as a renewable reservoir of psychological resources that enables proactive job redesign to translate into constructive deviant innovation while highlighting promotion focus as a dual-path catalyst in both resource generation and resource mobilization. This study advances our understanding of the micro-level mechanisms underlying sustainable innovation and offers practical guidance for organizations seeking to foster constructive deviance in a controlled and sustainable manner.