Thriving at work is a positive psychological state that captures employees' joint experience oflearning and vitality. Building on the socially embedded model of thriving , we first propose thepositive relationship between leader-member exchange (LMX) and retail employees' thriving atwork. We then explore store spatial crowding as a contextual constraint on this relationship. Tobetter reveal this contextual impact, we further contend that team negative affective tone medi-ates the cross-level moderating effect of store spatial crowding on the LMX–thriving linkage.Using two-wave survey data collected from retail employees and their store managers across89 stores of a grocery retail chain, we found empirical evidence on our multilevel-mediatedmoderation model. This study highlights the importance of considering wider contextual fea-tures as boundary conditions to thriving. Our results suggest theoretical modifications to theexisting thriving model and offer implications on the practical interventions that retailing organi-zations can take to develop a thriving workforce.