Academic Library Director Leadership Styles and Questions of Democratic Governance and Active Citizenship

Abstract

The academic library plays a critical role in the healthy functioning of the academic institution as a whole. When considering the impact of libraries on peoples’ lives, it behooves us to consider how libraries impact those staff internal to the library as much as those served in the outside community. This paper focuses on a combination of public administration theory and data collected from academic library directors in public and private nonprofit institutions of higher education broadly across the U.S. via an instrument that combined the Authentic Leadership Questionnaire (ALQ), Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ), and Academic Library Director Leadership Skills & Qualities Survey. The authors explore such questions as how library director leadership styles might be related to norms of democratic governance, whether certain leadership styles lend themselves more to facilitating and encouraging active citizenship behaviors by staff than others, what trends in academic library leadership data currently exist in an immediately post-pandemic world, and what leadership development might be most appropriate for academic library directors hoping to provide an environment conducive to deep employee engagement. Due to the service-oriented nature of educational leadership and librarianship, the authors anticipate a positive correlation between employee engagement and authentic and transformational leadership traits.

Details

Session 1

11:15am – 12:30pm

Del Norte Hall

Room A: 1555