Abstract:    At present, interdisciplinary research has become an important trend in building the management theory system of China. We wonder, therefore, whether management scholars will engage in interdisciplinarity research? Based on the optimal distinctiveness theory, utilizing a large sample of 37,046 international management papers from 16,400 Chinese management scholars during 20 years (2002-2021) of the internationalization of Chinese management research, this study empirically examined the impact of scholars′ knowledge diversification on their academic performance. We found that, knowledge diversification has a positive effect on academic performance through the innovation mechanism, and that knowledge dissimilarity plays positive and negative roles through both innovation and legitimacy mechanism, eliciting an inverted U-shaped effect. In addition, we analyzed the intertwined effects of the two, finding that combining both knowledge diversification and dissimilarity is not conducive to boosting the publication counts, but it can synergistically contribute to the citation counts. The study has unveiled the black box of how scholars′ knowledge diversification affects their academic performance, and therefore advanced the optimal distinctiveness theory. The research findings will have important implications for scholars on how to engage in interdisciplinary research and will also provide insights for policy-makers on establishing interdisciplinary fields.

Key words: diversification of knowledge, academic performance, optimal distinctiveness, interdisciplinary research