24th May 2016

MGMT638 Ethical Leadership and

Social Responsibility

GROUP ASSIGNMENT: Report On

Leaders Interview and His Leadership
Style

SUBMITTED BY:
PRATYUSH TAUJALE / S00196720
POONAM ARYA / S00196723
KEEMING RAJBHANDARI / S00176989
SHAKIL MAHMUD / S00191962
MIKESH SUWAL / S00177005
KEVIN BRAHMIN / S00213205

AUSTRALIAN CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY

TABLE OF CONTENTS
ORGANIZATIONAL BACKGROUND....................................................................2
LEADER IN PICTURE.........................................................................................2
1. Being Involved with People in Tasks........................................................2
2. Setting Targets for Employees:...............................................................2
3. Team Based Work:...................................................................................3
4. Providing Guidelines and Support to Followers for Doing Tasks:.............3
5. Valuing Responsibility and Relationship:.................................................3
6. Encouraging Change and Innovation......................................................3
7. Ethical Practices......................................................................................4
EVALUATION OF EFFECTIVENESS OF THE LEADERSHIP BASED ON THEORIES. 4
1. Evaluation of His People and Task Oriented Leadership..........................4
2. Contingency leadership..........................................................................4
3. Path-goal leadership:..............................................................................4
4. Transformational Leadership...................................................................4
5. Situational leadership.............................................................................5
6. Ethical Leadership...................................................................................5
RECOMMENDATION FOR IMPROVEMENT IN LEADERSHIP:................................5
REFERENCES.................................................................................................7

ORGANIZATIONAL BACKGROUND
Coles is an Australian supermarket chain founded in 1914 owned by Wesfarmers. For over the
100 years Coles has been delivering high quality products and services. Coles stands among the
top position holder in retail market in Australia. We are really happy that we got Chris Cauchi,
the store manager of the Coles Store in East Village, as our leader for the interview. This store is
one of the largest selling stores of Coles in Sydney.

LEADER IN PICTURE
Our Leader, Chris Cauchi (Contact No. 0433222767, Store Manager, Coles East Village, 4
Defries Avenue, Zetland) has been associated with Coles for a long span of 17 years. After
completing High School studies, he concentrated on building his career that commenced with
Coles and left his education. He does agree that higher education indeed helps in securing higher
designations. However, his varied experiences and passion in retail helped him utmost to attain
the designation of a Store Manager. According to him, Coles is not merely a retail chain, its a
lifestyle where knowing customers likings are the key to success. Chris as a leader in this
organization who involves in following leadership practices:
1. Being Involved with People in Tasks: Chris firmly believes that his managerial practice
in Coles indicates top down approach. He believes rendering too much guidance to
people tend to decreases their motivation for creativity. He understands his subordinates
and assigns tasks based on their performance, individual capability and positions. Being
an active listener he appreciates learning from his mistakes and seeks opinion. He
highlights the need for a leader being engaged in tasks with subordinates as gives his
presence to the team members through guidance, suggestion, listening to grievances or
with simple gestures. Concerned about workers safety and well-being, he feels delighted
to discover about his subordinates benefits and happiness with their job. He thinks that
the best asset of a leader is respects from followers.
2. Setting Targets for Employees: When asked to make a choice among Task or
Concern for people, he diplomatically answered, task has to be accomplished always

but at the same time taking care of people is important, to be successful and most
effective, a leader must maintain an equilibrium between both. The quality of a leader
is in recognizing the ability and motivating the employees while assigning tasks.
3. Team Based Work: He prefers team work and feels that performing successfully without
subordinates co-operations is next to impossible. (Contingency leadership).
4. Providing Guidelines and Support to Followers for Doing Tasks: He understands the
facts that everyone makes mistakes. Thus, he ensures his support to his followers
throughout by listening carefully to be aware of their problems. He tries being well aware
of team members ability and physical conditions. For example: leader should know
whether his subordinates had a sound sleep or fit enough, to understand their physical
conditions. A leader must know what is required (such as training, necessary equipments
etc.) to perform a particular task effectively. He believes that imposing target is not
enough, but getting involved in the pathway to achieve targets is the responsibility of
leaders.
5. Valuing Responsibility and Relationship: He thinks leadership means being effective,
honest, taking risk, passionate, accountable and building relationships. A leader will
understand different perspectives of subordinates as every individual has different
mindset and a leader has to work with all. Sometimes money is not enough, respect and
trusts are equally prominent for employee motivation. The responsible behavior of
knowing about subordinates situations helps in building strong relationships with them
as employee motivation comes through leaders behavior (handshake, smiling, making
fun with subordinates etc.). He makes decisions based on situations.
6. Encouraging Change and Innovation: He seeks changes seeking efficient ways of
doing things and believes that the subordinates should be rewarded for their contribution
individually. The whole team can also be recognized if it is a team contribution. He looks
at the employees positive contributions rather than finding failures.
7. Ethical Practices: Although his abilities and experiences helped most to achieve his
present position but, his ethics and honesty supported him to a greater extent. For him,

prosperity comes through ethical leadership that he learned by following his previous
manager as his role model.

EVALUATION OF EFFECTIVENESS OF THE LEADERSHIP BASED ON

THEORIES
1. Evaluation of His People and Task Oriented Leadership:
With his first activity of being involved with people, we analyzed a democratic behavior
as he is an open-minded professional considering suggestions from others. He keeps
himself engaged with team being people oriented. He values respect from the fellow team
members. He strongly believes that achieving target is obvious in the organization, which
indicates the high concern for tasks but he also said that leaders should have a good
balance between people and task orientation. This indicates his High Emotional
Intelligence with High Concern for People.
2. Contingency leadership: The manager emphasized on teamwork saying that achieving
objective is impossible without team effort, which expresses his contingency leadership
style.
3. Path-goal leadership: When we observed his guiding and supporting activities with
subordinates, we found that he strongly prefers to give continuous support and clear
directions for achieving the targets. This characteristics support Path goal theory of
leadership.
4. Transformational Leadership: As a leader, Chris tends to lead by inspiration, rapport or
empathy to engage his employees. He is passionate, courageous, and confident and shows
readiness to make sacrifices for the greater good to work within the system. He
emphasizes on taking calculated risks and tackles challenges by learning from his own
and others experiences. He also mentioned about giving respect, trust, good behavior that
signifies his people orientation. Since he strongly encourages change and creativity, these
reflect intellectual stimulation of transformational leadership.

5. Situational leadership: Chris stresses on the point that every individual is unique and
has different personalities and expectations. So, in order to skillfully guide the demands
of this diverse taskforce and dynamic market he should be flexible but at the same time
simplify his execution. Thus, he portrays selling style of leadership by adopting high in
task and relationship orientation.
6. Ethical Leadership: The leader believes that for organizations prosperity leadership is
obvious that Chris practices. Rather than idealized influence, these motivations come
from his moral principles as extracted from Virtue ethics and Deontology.

RECOMMENDATION FOR IMPROVEMENT IN LEADERSHIP:

Reviewing his leadership styles and in light to the theories of leadership we list down few
recommendations which as we feel may help in his consistent leadership.
1. From the conversation we felt he gained all his achievement from the learning of his life
and few inherited from his idols. Still having some management courses and leadership
workshops might help him to know himself better and be proactive in his leadership.
2. Realizing his democratic way in dealing people we highlight his needs to use harsh
methods to deal with consistent under-performing employees. This is to ensure that the
employees dont take his kindness for granted and jeopardize his personal and
organizations vision.
3. We felt his relationship oriented nature might bring some conflict in decision making. In
some situations, people find it difficult to differentiate between task-related conflict
issues and their personal speculation of relationship. Thus, we recommend him not to mix
his relationships with his team members during his work.
4. We were really inspired by his achievements without possessing any higher education.
We were convinced with his hard work, dedication, passion to work and his experiences
from his School of hard Knocks in the industry helped him get to this position. However,

it may sound boasting to others when he explicates the same to others. Emphasizing on
his achievement of a senior designation solely through his own hard work and
experience, it somehow brings out the question of him having trait of narcissist. We tried
to evaluate this and came across with negative scores of 7 out of 40. Higher scores
indicate greater levels of narcissism thus; we recommend him to keep up with this
attitude.

REFERENCES

Agrawal G. R. 2004, Organizational Behavior in Nepal, M.K. Publisher and Distributers,

Kathmandu, Nepal.
GJ
Coles,
1928,

https://www.coles.com.au/about-coles/centenary
Peter Bowden 2012, Applied Ethics,
Raskin, R.; Terry, H. (1988). "A principal-components analysis of the Narcissistic

Our

History

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20,

2016

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