Leadership (AQA A Level Business): Exam Questions

Source A: Linneth Hotels Ltd

Linneth Hotels Ltd owns four hotels on the Northumberland coast. Between them they have 268 rooms and 160 employees, and in the year to October 2025 the company had revenue of £8.9 million and an operating profit of £0.62 million.

The business lives and dies by the seasons. In July and August the hotels are almost full. In January and February they are more than half empty, and the company cuts shifts to match. Most of its people are therefore taken on for the season rather than the year, and many of them do not come back.

Until last year the hotels were run by Gerald Linneth, who founded the company in 1998. His way of managing was simple: he made the decisions, he told people what to do, and he checked that it had been done. Rotas were posted on a Friday for the following week and arguing with them was not encouraged. He believed hospitality was too fast-moving for discussion.

In November 2025 he handed the running of the hotels to a new general manager, Priya Raman, who had previously managed a single large hotel in Edinburgh. She has started doing things differently. Housekeeping and kitchen teams now set their own rotas within rules the company agrees. Every hotel holds a short meeting at the start of each shift where any member of staff can raise a problem. She has promised that anyone who stays a full season will be offered training towards a recognised hospitality qualification.

Not everyone is convinced. Two of the four hotel managers have worked for Gerald Linneth for over twenty years and think the new approach is slow and soft. Gerald Linneth still owns the company and still visits every week.

Source: Linneth Hotels Ltd

Appendix B: What Linneth Hotels Ltd employees say

Scores out of 10, averaged across all four hotels

Employees who responded: 118 of 160

Source: Linneth Hotels Ltd staff survey

Appendix C: How the hotels were run, and how they are run now

Source: Linneth Hotels Ltd

Assess whether changing the leadership style is the best way for Linneth Hotels Ltd to improve its performance.

Source A: John Lewis Partnership

The John Lewis Partnership owns the John Lewis department stores and the Waitrose supermarkets. It is not owned by shareholders. It is owned by the people who work in it, who are called Partners rather than employees, and who share in the profits through an annual Partnership Bonus paid as a percentage of pay.

For most of its history that bonus was the thing everybody knew about the business. It was announced each March, it was the same percentage for the chief executive as for a shelf stacker, and it was how the Partnership said what it believed: that the people who do the work should own the business and share what it earns.

Then it stopped. The Partnership paid no bonus for three years. In March 2025 it reported that profits had tripled and still did not pay one, because the money was needed to invest in the business. For the year to January 2026 the bonus came back at 2%, worth about one week's pay, the first since 2022.

The underlying business improved. Partnership sales rose 5% to £13.4 billion and profit before tax, bonus and exceptional items rose 6% to £134 million. Cash generated from operations reached £595 million, up £63 million. The Partnership is investing £108 million in base pay in 2026.

The two halves of the Partnership are very different. Waitrose grew sales 7% to £8.5 billion with an adjusted operating profit of £256 million. John Lewis grew sales 3% to £4.9 billion with an adjusted operating profit of £58 million.

The Partnership is also run differently. It has a written constitution, Partners elect representatives who can question the chief executive, and a Partner can raise a concern through an elected body rather than through their line manager.

Source: John Lewis Partnership full year results, 2025 and 2026

Appendix B: Sales and profitability of the two brands

Source: Analyst calculation from John Lewis Partnership results

Appendix C: The Partnership compared with a conventional retailer

Source: Analyst

Assess whether being owned by its Partners makes the John Lewis Partnership harder to lead.

Calculate Waitrose's adjusted operating margin to support your answer.

Source A: Harrowgate Mutual

Harrowgate Mutual sells home and motor insurance. It employs 300 people in Leeds, takes £86 million in premiums a year and made an operating profit of £4.2 million in the year to March 2025. It is a mutual, which means it has no shareholders and is owned by its policyholders.

Three years ago the regulator found that Harrowgate's telephone sales team had been selling add-on cover that many customers did not need and in some cases could never have claimed on. The company was fined £7.4 million and has paid £11.9 million back to customers.

Nobody at Harrowgate set out to mis-sell. What happened was that 68% of a salesperson's pay came from commission, the commission was paid on the number of add-ons sold rather than on whether the customer kept the policy, and the weekly sales table was read out every Monday morning. Managers were promoted on the same numbers. When one team leader raised concerns in 2021 she was told the figures were the figures.

The new chief executive, Ama Boateng, arrived in early 2025 from a larger insurer. She has cut commission to 15% of pay, stopped the Monday sales table, created a staff forum that meets the board twice a year, and rewritten the company's values so that the first one is now “sell only what the customer needs”.

Some of it has worked. Complaints upheld against Harrowgate by the Financial Ombudsman Service have fallen sharply. Some of it has not. Sales of add-ons have fallen further than expected, a third of the original sales team has left, and several long-serving managers say privately that the company has swung from one extreme to the other and that nobody is now willing to ask a customer for anything.

Source: Harrowgate Mutual

Appendix A: What happened at Harrowgate Mutual

Source: Harrowgate Mutual

Appendix C: How Harrowgate's sales team was managed, before and now

Source: Harrowgate Mutual

Assess the impact of the new chief executive's leadership on Harrowgate Mutual's performance.

Source A: Patagonia

Patagonia makes outdoor clothing and equipment, and has spent fifty years arguing that people should buy less of it. It employs about 4 000 people worldwide, repairs what it has already sold through its Worn Wear programme, and has given 1% of its sales to grassroots environmental groups every year since 1985.

In September 2022 its founder, Yvon Chouinard, gave the company away. All the voting shares, which are 2% of the company, went to the Patagonia Purpose Trust, which exists to hold the company to its values. All the non-voting shares, the other 98%, went to the Holdfast Collective, a non-profit organisation that uses the money to fight the environmental crisis. The company was valued at about 3 billion US dollars at the time. Patagonia's own statement was short: Earth is now our only shareholder.

The culture inside the company is as unusual as the ownership. There has been childcare on site at head office for more than thirty years. Employees may take time out of the working day when the surf is up or the snow is good, on the understanding that the work still gets done. Very few people leave: about four in every hundred each year, against roughly thirteen in a hundred across retail and consumer products.

None of this removes the contradiction at the centre of the business. Patagonia sells clothing, and making clothing uses materials and energy. One per cent of sales goes to protecting nature; the other ninety-nine per cent goes on running a clothing company that would rather its customers mended what they already own.

Source: Patagonia Works

Appendix A: Who owns Patagonia since September 2022

Source: Patagonia Works

Appendix B: Patagonia compared with its sector

Source: Analyst

Assess the influence of the founder's values on the way Patagonia is now owned and led.

Calculate the value of the stake transferred to the Holdfast Collective to support your answer.

Source A: Linmoor Software Ltd

Linmoor Software Ltd writes scheduling software for care homes and veterinary practices. Two developers founded it in 2017, it now employs 70 people, and in the year to March 2025 it had revenue of £8.6 million and an operating profit of £940 000. It keeps one office in Leeds with 24 desks, and 58 of its 70 people work mainly from home.

For the first few years everybody could hear everybody else. Decisions were made in the room, the founders knew what every customer wanted, and nobody needed telling what the company was for. Twenty-eight of the current staff joined in the last twelve months, nine of them live outside the United Kingdom, and the company works across four time zones.

The annual survey has picked up what that has done. In 2022, when there were eighteen people, 88% said they knew who decided things. The same question now gets 44%. Only 32% have met most of their colleagues in person, and 37% have never met a founder.

Nothing has been written down. There is no description of how the company works, no employee forum, and most decisions are still announced in a group chat. The six team leads have had no leadership training, and the longest any of them has been in the role is fourteen months. Both founders still personally approve any spending over £2 000.

The whole company is together in one place once a year. The board has been asked whether that is enough.

Source: Linmoor Software Ltd

Appendix B: What Linmoor's people said in 2022, and what they say now

Share agreeing, percentages

Source: Analyst

Appendix C: How Linmoor is led and how decisions get made

Source: Analyst

Assess how well Linmoor Software Ltd is led now that most of its people work from home.

Source A: Revolut

Revolut is a digital bank. It has no branches: customers open an account on their phone, usually in minutes, and use it to spend, send and exchange money. It was founded in London in 2015 by Nik Storonsky and has grown faster than almost any European business of its size.

The numbers are remarkable. In 2024 it had 52.5 million retail customers, up 38%, revenue of £3.1 billion, up 72%, and net profit of £790 million. In 2025 customers rose another 30% to 68.3 million, group revenue rose 46% to 6.0 billion US dollars and profit before tax reached 2.3 billion US dollars, a profit margin of 38%. A fundraising in 2025 valued the company at 75 billion US dollars. The workforce passed 10 000 in April 2024 and reached 12 200 during 2025.

That growth has been built on a demanding set of stated values. Revolut tells its people to “get it done” and to “never settle”, alongside “deliver wow”, “think deeper” and “dream team”. Performance is measured against quarterly targets, and the company says the values are not posters on a wall but the basis on which people are hired, promoted and let go.

The culture that produces those results also attracts criticism. On the review site Glassdoor, 76% of employees say they would recommend Revolut to a friend, but the company scores 3.6 out of 5 for work-life balance and 3.8 for culture and values. A number of reviews describe meetings in which people are humiliated, managers who lack interpersonal skills, and so heavy a focus on quarterly targets that employees lose sight of anything else. Commentators have questioned whether people who are overworked and burnt out can be expected to be good colleagues, and the chief executive's management style has been criticised for creating long hours and high staff turnover.

Revolut has begun work on changing parts of its culture while insisting that the high-performance core of it stays.

Source: Revolut annual report 2024, Revolut results announcements 2025, and published reviews

Appendix B: Revolut's stated values and what employees say

Source: Revolut and published reviews

Appendix C: Revolut's workforce

Source: Analyst

Evaluate two ways in which Revolut's leaders could reduce the number of employees who leave within their first year and recommend which one they should choose.

Source A: Harrowgate Mutual

Harrowgate Mutual sells home and motor insurance. It employs 300 people in Leeds, takes £86 million in premiums a year and made an operating profit of £4.2 million in the year to March 2025. It is a mutual, which means it has no shareholders and is owned by its policyholders.

Three years ago the regulator found that Harrowgate's telephone sales team had been selling add-on cover that many customers did not need and in some cases could never have claimed on. The company was fined £7.4 million and has paid £11.9 million back to customers.

Nobody at Harrowgate set out to mis-sell. What happened was that 68% of a salesperson's pay came from commission, the commission was paid on the number of add-ons sold rather than on whether the customer kept the policy, and the weekly sales table was read out every Monday morning. Managers were promoted on the same numbers. When one team leader raised concerns in 2021 she was told the figures were the figures.

The new chief executive, Ama Boateng, arrived in early 2025 from a larger insurer. She has cut commission to 15% of pay, stopped the Monday sales table, created a staff forum that meets the board twice a year, and rewritten the company's values so that the first one is now “sell only what the customer needs”.

Some of it has worked. Complaints upheld against Harrowgate by the Financial Ombudsman Service have fallen sharply. Some of it has not. Sales of add-ons have fallen further than expected, a third of the original sales team has left, and several long-serving managers say privately that the company has swung from one extreme to the other and that nobody is now willing to ask a customer for anything.

Source: Harrowgate Mutual

Appendix B: Complaints and sales at Harrowgate Mutual

Source: Harrowgate Mutual

Appendix C: How Harrowgate's sales team was managed, before and now

Source: Harrowgate Mutual

Evaluate two ways in which Harrowgate Mutual's leaders could win back the trust of the sales team and recommend which one they should choose.

Source A: Ashcombe Academy Trust

Ashcombe Academy Trust runs five secondary schools in the south west of England. It employs 480 people, of whom 285 are teachers, and teaches about 4 100 pupils. Its income last year was £31.4 million, almost all of it from government funding, and it finished the year with a surplus of £400 000.

Its problem is keeping teachers. Fifty-seven left last year. Most did not go to another school: they left teaching. When a class has no teacher the trust books a supply teacher through an agency, at a day rate that has risen every year, and supply teachers rarely mark work or know the pupils.

The chief executive, Dr Helena Marsh, cannot pay more. Teachers' pay is set nationally and the trust has no power to change it. What she can change is everything else: how teachers are appraised, how much notice they get of a timetable change, whether they have time in the school day to plan and mark, and how decisions are taken in each school.

At present every teacher is appraised once a year against three targets, two of which are pupil examination results. Heads of department set the targets in September and review them the following July. Teachers say the appraisal is about proving they are doing their job rather than helping them do it better, and that the parts of the job they find hardest, such as behaviour and workload, are not what they are measured on.

Dr Marsh has two proposals in front of her. Neither of them is more pay, because more pay is not available.

Source: Ashcombe Academy Trust

Appendix B: When teachers leave Ashcombe

Source: Ashcombe Academy Trust

Appendix C: How teachers are appraised, now and as proposed

Source: Ashcombe Academy Trust

Evaluate two ways in which Ashcombe Academy Trust's leaders could improve the way teachers are managed, given that they cannot change pay, and recommend which one they should choose.