Companies outsource operational units worth billions to external third parties each year. Isabelle Wrase explores the hypothesis that in successful outsourcing, the receiving company can better motivate the transferred employees and thus benefit from their knowledge. She incorporates resource-oriented and motivational psychological approaches, as well as an empirical verification based on a survey of the affected employees. As a practical consequence, it follows that the receiving company should primarily conduct employee transfers in entire teams to protect itself from long-term knowledge loss.