[Purpose/Significance] Amid the national initiative to build a strong education system and worldclass universities with Chinese characteristics, university libraries serve as core hubs for academic resources and frontline platforms for comprehensive knowledge services. Their overall development level has long been regarded as a key indicator reflecting a university's comprehensive academic strength. The rapid advancement of information technology and artificial intelligence has thoroughly reshaped the traditional modes of knowledge production, dissemination and service delivery, bringing profound transformations and unprecedented challenges to academic libraries across the globe. Library directors, as top leaders of library organizations, steer the long-term development direction and determine the overall operational quality of libraries. Relevant exploration into library directors' leadership behaviors remains insufficient in current academic circles, which hinders the progress of modern library management and the improvement of professional leadership competency. In-depth exploration into typical leadership traits of directors from world-class universities fills existing research gaps, offers practical references for management optimization of domestic university libraries, and supports systematic leadership training for in-service directors and young reserve talents in the library industry. [Method/Process] Ten library directors affiliated with top 100 universities on the 2025 Times Higher Education World University Rankings serve as research samples. These prestigious institutions span six countries across Asia, Europe, America and Oceania and cover comprehensive and specialized academic disciplines, ensuring high representativeness and rationality for the whole research. Raw data derive from detailed in-depth interviews collected in the book Conversations with Leading Academic and Research Library Directors. Content analysis is adopted to carry out single-case interpretation for each director and cross-case induction for universal behavioral patterns. Multiple professional researchers conduct independent open coding on interview texts first, followed by collective classification,repeated discussion and rigorous professional expert verification. Eight core dimensions of leadership behavior are finally summarized from massive coded content. [Result/Conclusion] Eight core dimensions are extracted,including idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, individualized consideration, moral demonstration, team collaboration, technology empowerment and inclusive culture development. The first four dimensions embody people-oriented management concepts and fully align with classic transformational leadership theories. Moral demonstration, once regarded as a typical localized leadership feature in Eastern cultures, proves to be a widely practiced and valued trait among outstanding library leaders worldwide. Team collaboration,technology empowerment and inclusive culture development jointly reflect strong environmental adaptability to digital trends and diverse organizational demands. Overall, leadership behaviors of library directors at world-class universities fall into three major attributes: people-oriented governance, adherence to leadership ethics, and active adaptation to changing environments. Relevant findings enrich the theoretical system of library leadership research, reveal both universal rules and individual differences in leadership practices, and provide solid theoretical and practical support for high-quality leadership construction and sustainable development of university libraries in China.
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