Investigating managers' exploration and exploitation activities: The influence of top-down, bottom-up, and horizontal knowledge inflows*

This paper develops and tests hypotheses on the influence of managers' knowledge inflows on managers' exploration and exploitation activities. Based on a survey among managers of a leading electronics firm, the findings indicate, as expected, that top-down knowledge inflows of managers positively relate to the extent to which these managers conduct exploitation activities, while they do not relate to managers' exploration activities. Furthermore, as expected, bottom-up and horizontal knowledge inflows of managers positively relate to these managers' exploration activities, while they do not relate to managers' exploitation activities. We contribute to current literature on exploration and exploitation by focusing on the manager level of analysis, and by adding the importance of knowledge flow configurations to studies which investigate the impact of organizational factors on exploration and exploitation.