Abstract:The interdisciplinary team in universities is an important carrier for universities to connect with the "Double First Class" construction, target international cutting-edge scientific issues, face major health needs, and carry out organized scientific research. Through interdisciplinary and collaborative research, it could obtain original research results with significant international influence and leadership, as well as significant achievements in serving human health. However, interdisciplinary knowledge fusion also faces the contradiction of knowledge fusion among team members in multiple disciplines, fields, and backgrounds. Paradox leadership can effectively address issues in the innovation process of interdisciplinary teams in universities. Through empirical research on 48 teams from C9 universities in China, a moderating mediation model was constructed based on paradoxical leadership, ability reconstruction, social identity, and team innovation theories. It adopts multi-level linear regression and Bootstrapping repeated sampling to investigate the mechanism of paradoxical leadership affecting team innovation, as well as the mediating effect of ability reconstruction and the moderating effect of social identity. The results showed that paradoxical leadership positively affects team innovation; Capability reconstruction plays a completely mediating role between the two; Social identity weakens the impact of paradoxical leadership on team innovation. This paper not only reveals the important mechanism of paradoxical leadership in team innovation, but also proposes practical implications for promoting team innovation in the Chinese context, thus providing a new perspective for interdisciplinary team innovation in universities.