Background:
Work innovation is essential to both employee and organizational success in today’s highly competitive work environment. Although scholars have found personality (e.g., openness to experience) to relate to innovative work behavior, only some research has examined how context might influence personality’s effects, and very few studies have examined work environments (e.g., workplace politics) that could be detrimental to innovative behavior.

Participants and procedure:
Taking a trait activation approach, across two time points, we examined how openness affects the perceptions of organizational politics (POP)–innovative work behavior relationship using a sample of employees and supervisors working in a variety of finance sectors.

Results:
The results revealed that innovative work behaviors, as rated by managers both concurrently and six months later, decrease for employees low on openness under conditions of elevated POP, but are not reduced for those high on openness under high POP. Thus, the (only) employees whose innovative behavior was negatively affected were those who were otherwise least prone to engage in work innovation (i.e., those low on openness), indicating the harmful effect of workplace politics on this valuable work behavior.

Conclusions:
These findings suggest that scholars should develop a more nuanced understanding of openness’s long-established relationship with innovation at work, paying particular attention to the context of their openness studies.