["The Journal of Creative Behavior, Volume 60, Issue 3, September 2026. ", "\nABSTRACT\nEmployee creativity is vital for organizational innovation, yet how status‐striving orientations shape creativity remains underexplored. Drawing on social hierarchy belief theory and situational strength theory, we develop and test a cross‐level moderated mediation model examining how status cooperation orientation and status competition orientation affect employee creativity through knowledge sharing and knowledge hiding, and whether team goal congruence moderates these pathways. Data were collected across three waves from 479 employees and 72 supervisors in 17 Chinese enterprises. Multilevel structural equation modeling revealed that status cooperation orientation positively predicts creativity via enhanced knowledge sharing, while status competition orientation negatively predicts creativity via increased knowledge hiding. Team goal congruence significantly moderates the negative pathway, weakening the detrimental effect of status competition orientation on knowledge hiding and creativity, though no significant moderating effect emerged for the knowledge sharing pathway. Theoretically, this study extends creativity research by integrating status motivation with knowledge behavior mechanisms in a multilevel framework, and enriches situational strength theory by identifying team goal congruence as a boundary condition. Practically, organizations should cultivate cooperative status climates and align team goals to mitigate the creativity‐inhibiting effects of competitive status orientations.\n"]