Clustering employees on the basis of their cognitive and emotional knowledge and analysing their exploratory and exploitative innovations: a case study in a service company

It has been widely accepted that knowledge holds a key role in innovation. However, the ways of managing the knowledge to facilitate this process have not entirely been concurred with. Therefore, one of the major concerns of a lot of scholars has been to find practical ways of implementing their theories or empirical evidence to enlighten them to better ways of managing knowledge. The present study is an attempt to touch upon the influence of knowledge management on the innovation of employees. In order to do so, knowledge was divided into two categories of cognitive and emotional and innovation into two categories of exploratory and exploitative. The participants were then grouped based on their level of cognitive and emotional knowledge. The data were gathered through two questionnaires designed based on the employees' capabilities and their exploratory and exploitative innovation. To examine the data, cluster analysis and analysis of variance were exploited. The findings indicate that both emotional and cognitive knowledge influence the exploitative innovation. However, it is merely emotional knowledge level that significantly influences exploratory innovation.