<![CDATA[Purpose – Human capital's effect on innovative work behaviour has been reported as both absent and significant across studies. This study tests whether knowledge sharing behaviour explains this contradiction as a boundary condition, alongside strategic innovation-oriented leadership's tested direct and indirect effects on innovative work behaviour. Design/methodology/approach – Data from permanent employees across regional water utility enterprises in East Java, Indonesia, were analysed with PLS-SEM, confirmatory tetrad analysis, the cross-validated predictive ability test, and Necessary Condition Analysis. Finding/Results – Strategic leadership built employee capability and independently shaped innovative behaviour; capability alone did not reliably predict innovative behaviour, and a formal test found no significant mediation through capability. The capability-behaviour link was conditional on knowledge sharing, turning positive at higher levels and negative, as an indicative estimate, at lower levels. Strategic leadership further emerged as the necessary condition with the lowest bottleneck threshold among the three antecedents tested. Originality/Value – The findings help reconcile part of the inconsistency in the intellectual capital literature by identifying knowledge sharing as a theoretically grounded boundary condition, and they demonstrate the value of pairing sufficiency and necessity logic in explaining when, not merely whether, human capital capability matters for innovation.]]>
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