Leadership Challenges and Ethical Dilemmas

This assignment delves into the complex world of leadership, focusing on the ethical dilemmas encountered by business leaders across diverse sectors. It examines case studies of prominent CEOs like Alan Joyce (Qantas) and Laura McBain (Bellamy’s), analyzing their leadership styles and the ethical challenges they faced. The assignment also considers the impact of global factors such as market pressures, social responsibility, and regulatory environments on ethical decision-making in businesses. Students are expected to critically evaluate these cases and propose strategies for navigating ethical complexities in modern business leadership.

Running head: THREE AUSTRALIAN BUSINESS LEADERS
Three Australian Business Leaders
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author Note:

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Table of Contents
Introduction:...............................................................................................................................2
Three interviews of three Australian CEOs from business sector:............................................2
Laura McBain:...........................................................................................................................3
David Ingle Thodey:..................................................................................................................4
Joseph Joyce:..............................................................................................................................6
a) The ways in which each leader is constructed as a leader by the accounts:..........................8
b) The description conceptualisation of leadership by the three leaders:..................................9
c) Conceptualisation of success through the leadership of the three leaders:............................9
Organisational issues faced by the three leaders:.....................................................................10
Recommendations to address the issues:.................................................................................11
Conclusion:..............................................................................................................................11
References:...............................................................................................................................13

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Introduction:
The aim of the paper is to critically analyse the leadership approaches of three
business leaders in work related environment and provide recommendations to improve their
leadership qualities. The aim has been fulfilled by study of three interviews and biographies
of three eminent CEOs in Australia. They three CEOs studied are Laura McBain, former
CEO, Bellamy, David Thodey, former CEO, Telstra and Joseph Joyce, CEO, Qantas. The
paper opens with a brief discussion on the leadership qualities of these three leaders, which
provides ground to the subsequent sections. The second section studies their leadership
accountability to the success of the organisations they lead. The second section studies their
conceptualisation of leadership and their concept of success to them. The next section
revolves around pointing out an issue in one of the three leaders and recommending ways to
rectify this issue.
Three interviews of three Australian CEOs from business sector:
Jones (2015) points out that the leadership styles of the Australian CEOs, their power,
their leadership experience and their ways of dealing with challenges make them subject to
various interviews. The CEOs of the business organisations in Australia especially the
multinational companies play very significant role in leading their organisations in the global
market. While exploring the importance of the leadership functions of the CEOs, House et al.
(2013) state that the leadership qualities of the CEOs during tough market situation form the
base of the market positions companies enjoy. The three very famous and successful CEOs
from Australia are Laura McBain, former CEO, Bellamy’s Organic, David Thodey, former
CEO, Telstra and Joseph Joyce, CEO, Qantas Airlines.

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Laura McBain:
Laura McBain was the former CEO of Bellamy and the present managing director of
Primary Opinion Limited, the owner of Maggie Beer Products Private Limited. Her interview
in one of the Australian daily reveals that she has a rich experience of working as an
accountant and then held a strategic position at Telstra. Her interviews in the leading dailies
in Australia reveal that her transformational leadership style led Bellamy Organic to
expand into new markets like China. As a corporate leader she had several leadership
qualities like power to influence. Her influential power was evident by the fact that the share
prices of Bellamy fell on announcement of her resignation as the CEO. Another Ausralian
daily pointed out her strong influential power as a leader when she announced to join Primary
Opinion, the holding company Maggie’s Beer. The shareholders of the company expected
rise in the share prices by forty eight percent (Clark, 2017). This rise in share price of
Primary Opinion showed her fame and influence as a corporate leader. Laura McBain was
awarded with the Telstra Tasmanian Business Woman of the Year 2013. This award proved
her success in leading the organisation, Bellamy towards business excellence
(bellamysorganic.com.au, 2017). Her decision making power led to Bellamy becoming self
reliant about selling its own products. Her leadership put an end to the years of dependent of
Bellamy on international supermarket chains like Coles and Woolworths.
Interviews and articles show that Laura’s leadership at Bellamy had both positive and
negative impacts on the financial position of the company. Her strategic decisions like
expansion of Bellamy into the booming Asian markets like China gained the support of the
shareholders. This was evident by the rising of share price from $1 to $1.30. The share price
of Bellamy further rose as high as $ 15.48.
Laura McBain played a crucial role in placing Bellamy in a strong international
position but her leadership also saw several failures. However, one can point out that the first

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failure of her to lead the company was due to the impact of external environment over which
she had no control. The crackdown of the Chinese government on the imported goods
resulted in loss to the company worth billions of dollars and the share prices fell from $ 12.30
to $6.50. The second failure of McBain as the CEO of Bellamy was her extreme dependence
on the daigou supply chain in China and over reliance on the country’s market for revenue
generation. The third failure of McBain was to adapt the prices of its baby food products by
Bellamy very high. The competitors of Bellamy who produced cheaper baby food products
were able to generate more profits by selling their products in the Chinese market at cheaper
rates during the government crackdown (news.com.au, 2017).
David Ingle Thodey:
David Ingle Thodey is an Australian businessperson famous as the former CEO of
Telstra, the largest telecommunication company in Australia. His biographies show that he
has a long experience of leading organisations as a part of their apex management bodies.
Thodey has the experience of leading the marketing and sales department at IBM Australia
and New Zealand. He also led various departments of IBM in the Asia Pacific region and
held the position of managing director for a year. He joined Telstra as the Group Managing
Director who also took care of the stakeholder benefits. He, was appointed as the CEO of
Telstra in the year 2009 and retired from the position in 2015. After that he held the position
of the chairperson at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation or
CSIRO. He was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Australia for his contribution to
development of telecommunication industry in Australia, ethical leadership and workplace
diversity.
An interview of Thodey published in a leading Australian daily, Thodey expressed his
concerns about disparity of income in the Australian business sector. This concern of him

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reveals his aim of leading Telstra and operating it to ensure the benefit of the employees. This
also showed that as a business leader he regarding his followers strategically important for
the high market performance of the company (Whyte, 2017). A second leading daily in
Australia throws light on another aspect of leadership of David Thodey. It states that Thodey
is an expert in several aspects of business like technology, innovation and corporate culture
(dailytelegraph.com.au, 2017). It can be pointed out that this innovative nature and team
leadership qualities helped Thodey to lead Telstra to the top market position in Australia.
The first success of Thodey as the leader came with turnaround of Telstra as a market
performer and the subsequent rise in the share prices of the company. An article published in
a leading daily in Australia report several leadership qualities of Thodey and his contributions
to multinational organisations as their leader. David Ingle Thodey made great contributions to
the high market position of Telstra and helped the company to face the market challenges.
The article also pointed out the impact of his leadership qualities on the shareholders. The
share price of Telstra rose to a 14 point high after Thodey assumed office.
The second success evidence of Thodey’s leadership of Telstra was that he achieved
expansion of the market of the company. His able leadership and deep knowledge about
consumer demands and expectations led to innovations in products offered by Telstra. This
led to increase in the number of customers from 10.2 million mobile network subscribers and
2.3 broadband users to 16.4 million mobile users and 3 million broadband users.
The third success of Thodey as the CEO of Telstra was diversification of the product
line and business of Telstra. He was instrumental in expansion of Telstra market into Asia,
partnership with Telcom Indonesia and acquisition of Pacnet. The new products, which
Telstra introduced under the leadership of Thodey, consisted of e-heath. Thodey also

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strengthened the corporate social responsibility of Telstra and supported several start up
businesses.
The article revealed that David Thodey followed team leadership style while leading
Telstra. Thodey, as the CEO gave the credit for the success of Telstra to the team of
employees. This showed that Thodey as a leader was not autocratic and encouraged employee
participation in the daily activities of the company. The leadership style of his ensured that
the employees felt motivated to perform highly. This able leadership of Thodey is often
credited for placing Telstra as the leader in the Australian telecommunication industry
(bloomberg.com, 2017).
Joseph Joyce:
According to his biography available on the official site of Qantas, the leading
Australian airline company, its CEO Alan Joseph Joyce or Joseph Joyce is a transformational
leader. The biography credits Joyce for bringing about major changes in the company’s
structure and operations. The source gives credit to the transformational leadership of Joyce
which helped Qantas to turnaround since its privatisation in 1995. This ability to lead the
Qantas towards organisational change and turnaround into an international airline can b seen
as the first leadership traits of Joyce (Giessner 2016).
The source states that the Joyce as the CEO and leader of Qantas exhibited his
leadership by taking appropriate decisions on expansion of business of the airline company.
He brought about the organisational changes and expanded the then business of the company.
He expanded business of Qantas into Asia and diversified the business of the company. This
ability to take right decisions regarding expansion and diversification plans of Joyce was his
second leadership trait (Chung, 2013).

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The third leadership trait revealed by Joseph Joyce was his power to motivate this
staff by promoting employee empowerment and encouraging innovation. Joseph acquired a
hundred and a half aircrafts to strengthen the Qantas fleet of aircrafts. He approved robust
investment to modernise the crew of Qantas by training the crewmembers. He also approved
investments in technological advancement in Qantas to modernise the operations of the
company. This showed that Joseph as a business leader and CEO of Qantas put great
emphasis on the strategic development of efficiency of the staff by providing them with
training to improve their competencies. His as a dynamic leader stressed on bringing about
technological advancement in the modes of operations in Qantas. These business strategies of
Joyce resulted in highest financial performance of Qantas in 2016. This again proved the
leadership qualities of Joyce to take appropriate decisions to ensure high profitability for the
company and its shareholders (Felfe & Schyns, 2014).
The third business leadership trait of Joyce as the CEO of Qantas is, his ability to
ensure stakeholder benefit and stakeholder engagement in the operations of the company.
His expansion of the fleet of aircrafts and flight crew enabled the company to serve more
number of passengers. This ensured higher degree of customer satisfaction, which generated
huge revenue for Qantas and benefitted the shareholders by giving good returns on their
investments (Deng, Kang & Low, 2013).
The fourth leadership aspect of Joyce as a modern corporate leader was his strong
sense of corporate social responsibility. He supported development of the international
tourism sector, emphasised on gender equality for all employees including gays, indigenous
education in Australia and diversity (qantas.com, 2017).

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a) The ways in which each leader is constructed as a leader by the accounts:
An analysis of the interviews and biographies of the three leaders namely, Laura
McBain, David Thodey and Joseph Joyce show they have been constructed as leaders in
different ways. The comparison between their leadership style shows that their dynamic
styles of leading their business organisations accounted for increase in business excellence.
Laura McBain exhibited transformational leadership style by leading Bellamy Organic
towards business expansion. According to Abrash Walton (2016), transformational leadership
helps the organisations to tide over market setbacks and challenges. Mcbain led Bellamy
towards expansion into the booming markets of Asia. This helped Bellamy to diversify the
challenges it faced due to recession and limited market expansion in Australia. Joyce too
followed transformational leadership and brought about organisational changes in Qantas. He
like Mcbain led Qantas towards expansion in the Asia Pacific region. Thodey followed team
leadership style and stressed on empowerment of employees. He attributed the employees for
the successful turnaround and subsequent success of Telstra (Jackson, Schuler & Jiang,
2014). It can be pointed that Joyce, like Thodey stressed on employee empowerment
initiatives like training and modernisation of the operations like acquiring new modern
aircrafts. However, the records of McBain do not mention about her human resource
strategies. The interview and articles show that her plan of expansion of Bellamy’s business
into Asia particularly China led to high profits. This shows that she was responsible towards
the stakeholders like shareholders and ensured high returns on their investments (Chow,
2015). The fall in the prices of shares of Bellamy on announcement of her resignation and the
subsequent rise of Primary Opinion showed her power to influence the investment decisions
of the investors.
A contrast between McBain, Thodey and Joyce shows that among them, the interview
of McBian clearly exhibits the impact of markets on the CEOs. Smith (2016) states the

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crackdown of the Chinese government on the import of foreign goods affected the business
expansion of Bellamy. This was partly due to the extreme dependence of Bellamy on China
and the Chinee supply chain for its foreign revenue. Weichenrieder and Xu (2015) in support
of McBain say that corporate leaders have no control over unfavourable situations like
government crackdowns even though they have devastating impacts on their businesses. It
can this be inferred from this comparison between the leadership styles of McBain, Thodey
and Joseph that the biggest similarity between them is that their leadership accounted for
huge profits and business recovery to their companies, Bellamy, Telstra and Qantas
respectively (Cheng et al.2017).
b) The description conceptualisation of leadership by the three leaders:
An analysis of the three leadership style show that the three leaders conceptualise and
exhibit leadership in three different ways. Mcbain and Joseph exhibited transformational
leadership theory while Thodey followed team leadership theory. They followed
transformational leadership theory and helped their organisations expand into new markets.
(Ajayi & Morton, 2013). Thodey on the other hand, followed team leadership theory where
he stressed on the participation of a team to make business strategies successful. McBain
conceptualised her leadership by understanding the potential of Bellamy to enter Chinese
market while Thodey achieved a drastic improvement in the operations of Telstra (Danks,
2015).
c) Conceptualisation of success through the leadership of the three leaders:
An analysis of the leadership of McBain, Thodey and Joseph show that they helped
their companies to tide over market challenges. McBain recognised market opportunities of
expansion of Bellamy beyond Australia into China and counteract the limited scope of
growth within Australia. This decision of hers led to massive increase in the profits of

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Bellamy whose boosted share prices of the company. However, her fault to depend
excessively on China led to huge loss to Bellamy (Brennan, 2014).
David Thodey, like McBain brought about drastic improvement in the operations of
Telstra. As a business leader, his decisions to modernise Telstra helped the company to
turnaround and increase its customer base greatly. These leads to Telstra improve its market
position and ultimately emerge as the market leader in the Australian telecommunication
market. Like McBain, the concept of success to Thodey was largely foreign expansion into
new markets of Asia (Leeflang et al. 2014).
Concept of success for Joyace was largely diversity management, modernisation and
strengthening of human resource through training. He strengthened the fleet by acquiring new
aircrafts. He emphasised on providing training to employees to enhance their competencies.
Thus, for Joseph the conceptualisation of success consisted of acquisition of new resource,
empowerment of human resources and innovation and not mostly foreign expansion as in the
cases of the other two leaders (Johnson 2017).
Organisational issues faced by the three leaders:
The three chosen leaders namely McBain, Thodey and Joyce faced three different
organisational issues. McBain had to face dissatisfaction from shareholders, which resulted in
the fall of prices of Bellamy’s shares. This shareholders lack of approval was due to the
crackdown of Chinese government on import on foreign goods. This resulted in massive loss
to Bellamy, which actually made the shareholders remove their backing from McBain (Jones
et al. 2016).
Thodey faced the organisational issue of weak company performance and fragile
organisational structure of Telstra. The performance of the company was below standard and

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it lacked a huge customer base. The issue of lack of customer base resulted in low revenue
generation and market position of the company.
The organisational issue faced by Joseph Joyce was that Qantas after its privatisation
and reorganisation lacked the required resources. The company at a later stage faced issues
like its failure to price its flight tickets low like local airline companies which gave it a tough
competition.
Recommendations to address the issues:
The issue refers to loss Bellamy suffered due to loss of Chinese market, the resultant
huge loss and loss of shareholder support. It can be recommended to McBain, as per global
leadership theory, Bellamy should have entered the other Asian markets like Japan and India.
This would have shielded it from the loss caused due to crackdown of the Chinese
government. Current leadership researches show that companies should enter multiple
markets so diversify the loss earned from one markets over the others. Thus, it can be
recommended that entering several markets like Japan and Malaysia. It is advised that
Bellamy must open directly owned subsidiary in these countries in the public company
format. This will allow Bellamy to generate capital from the these countries as well and
diversify losses suffered due to unfavourable market conditions in one country(like China).
Conclusion:
The above analysis shows that modern successful corporate leaders have several
attributes in them in common. The first attribute is to lead their organisations through market
challenges and the power to bring about changes successfully to adapt to the market
situations. These leaders not only bring about development in the organisations they lead but
also cause development in the entire industry. The second attribute of successful corporate

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leaders are their ability to take decisions, which bring about profits and ensure stakeholders’
benefit simultaneously. They are not authoritative and encourage participation of their
subordinates in execution of business strategies. The third attribute of a modern world class
leader is that they have in-depth knowledge about the market and capitalise on opportunities
of business expansion. However, there are external market challenges which these leaders
face and have no control over them. The following recommendations can be made to
Thodey and Joyce in the light of the above discussion:
1. Thodey should follow the global expansion theory and expand the business of Telstra or
his future organisations into new markets. This will help them to tide over market stagnation
in Australia and ensure continuous revenue generation from these markets.
2. Joyce being the present CEO of Qantas should follow market penetration theory shown on
Ansoff framework. Qantas should lower the prices of its tickets and services to allow
maximum market penetration. This would allow the Australian multinational airline company
to give tough competition to the local airline companies by offering tickets at lower prices.

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