Digital Natives in a Knowledge Economy: will a New Kind of Leadership Emerge?

The aim of this paper is to understand whether digital natives will need a different approach to leadership development. The authors discuss that in knowledge economies extrinsic and explicit knowledge (knowing that) learning approaches are more important than traditional learning methods based on the idea that knowledge has a value per se and it is transferred tacitally (knowing how). In conclusion, authors do acknowledge the importance of extrinsic and explicit knowledge in digital natives learning; but, if they wish to become leaders, digital natives still have not only to turn their explicit knowledge into an implicit one (internalization) in order to intuitively use what they are learning but also natives need to learn more about social skills.