The paper aims to identify the ways in which explicit and tacit knowledge sharing occur in organizations and to investigate the impact of sharing these two knowledge types on the employee's rewards, performance, and intention to leave.

This paper focuses on two hi‐tech companies working in the telecommunications field producing cellular networks. The final sample consisted of 278 completed questionnaires from business departments including finance, R&D, marketing, IT, engineering, and manufacturing.

Explicit knowledge sharing is perceived by the employees as having: (1) a direct positive effect on the receipt of monetary rewards; (2) a positive indirect effect on the employee's performance; and it has a (3) positive direct and negative indirect effects on employee's intention to leave. Tacit knowledge sharing is perceived by employees as having: (1) a positive direct effect on the receipt of non‐monetary rewards; (2) a positive direct effect on performance; and (3) it has a positive indirect effect on employee's intention to leave.

Although the findings show that increased knowledge sharing results in positive outcomes at the individual level, the research model would benefit from an examination of larger samples for reasons of statistical complexity analysis and in order to allow for generalizability of the results to other companies that operate in similar environments. It would also be worthwhile to conduct a comparative analysis of companies from different industries.

Understanding knowledge‐sharing behaviors may prove helpful to managers in developing strategies to encourage organizational knowledge sharing and in the development of an organizational knowledge base. The knowledge sharing outcomes outlined here can give employees a way to predict potential positive outcomes and benefits that are likely to arise as a result of engaging in knowledge sharing activities.

The model enables for the first time to substantiate, in a valid way, to hypothesize that knowledge sharing within an organization is perceived by employees to be a rewarding behavior, improving employees' performance, and decrease the intention to leave. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.