Much of the knowledge management (KM) literature focuses on ways to increase the volume of knowledge available to employees, ensure its quality, and improve its accessibility. Such supply-side arguments are limited to the extent that they do not address the demand for knowledge within organizations. This paper takes a novel approach to understanding how access to others' knowledge produces benefits by studying the extent to which individuals intentionally access each other's expertise, experience, insights, and opinions, which we term knowledge sourcing. A general model of knowledge sourcing, including contextual and dispositional antecedents and learning outcomes, is proposed and validated using survey data from a global organization. Knowledge sourcing explains a significant proportion of individuals' learning outcomes, but the strength of this effect is moderated both by the strength of individuals' learning orientations and the degree to which they find their jobs to be intellectually demanding. For researchers, this study extends existing knowledge by proposing, testing, and validating a new way to understand an important KM issue in organizations. Practitioners can use these findings to evaluate existing KM efforts and better target future KM interventions towards those individuals most likely to benefit.knowledge management, knowledge sourcing, knowledge transfer, learning motivation, performance

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While many large businesses start out as a small enterprise, remarkably little is known about how an organization actually changes internally during the periods of growth. Small business growth is known to strain internal communication processes, for example, which likely limits growth opportunities. Information systems are often called upon to remedy such deficiencies. Through a participatory action research project, we investigated the ways in which a small business management 1 Michael Myers was the accepting senior editor for this paper. team developed an IS-enabled solution to address their growth needs. During the progression of the project, a new outcome of organizational effectiveness, internal transparency, was identified and developed. Adopting a punctuated equilibrium perspective, a theoretical process model is proposed that sheds light on a relationship between internal transparency, small business growth, and IS. The paper concludes with observations that internal transparency may well be a concept that offers significant potential for MIS research as well as a discussion about the applicability and credibility of participatory action research for this project.

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