4. Conclusion
Maritime favoritism is defined as favoritism of seafarers that are found
close due to various reasons such as family relations, place of birth,
acquaintance, school-favoritism and political reasons by ship captains,
chief engineers and organization managers who lead ships. Here,
sometimes, favoritism has turned into the organization’s culture and may
appear to provide ease in terms of finding candidates, selecting them
and placing them into the organization. In fact, all research has shown
that favoritism harms organizations. It has significant negative effects
in quality and safe operation of ships. It reduces the motivation levels
of employees and increases the rate of personnel turnover. Continuity of
operation has importance for ships. In cases of leaving jobs, the costs
of taking seafarers to their homeland create additional burdens for
organizations. This is also a negative issue in terms of the orientation
and awareness of seafarers. It was seen that there had been no study in
the literature so far on favoritism in relation to ship crew management.
With the purpose of revealing favoritism in ship crew management based
on the perceptions of employed seafarers, the “Favoritism in Ship Crew
Management Scale” was developed.
The developed favoritism in ship crew management scale gathered the
responses of seafarers to statements of favoritism in ship crew
management under three separate factors. As agreement with the statement
on favoritism based on school of graduation was higher than those of
other statements, its factor load turned out to be low. However, it was
not removed from the scale as it was within the threshold values
accepted in the literature. Favoritism is a situation that may harm safe
ship crew management. The fact the usually multinational personnel work
on ships brings about some difficulties in ship crew management.
Favoritism brings additional difficulties. Its most significant
disadvantage is that it prevents formation of teamwork. It reduces
motivation, disrupts the organizational climate and decreases commitment
to the profession and the organization. The statements of the seafarers
regarding favoritism were statistically analyzed. In this direction, an
exploratory factor analysis was conducted. According to the exploratory
factor analysis results scale to measure favoritism in ship crew
management.
A Cronbach’s alpha value of higher than 0.70 indicates a high level of
reliability. This value for the factors was as 0.912 for the 1st factor,
0.924 for the 2nd factor and 0.918 for the 3rd factor. As the
reliability coefficients of all factors were higher than 0.70, it was
shown that the scale was reliable overall. The corrected item-total
correlations varied between 0.408 and 0.830. Considering the findings on
the validity and reliability of the Favoritism in Ship crew management
Scale together, it may be stated that the scale is a valid and reliable
data collection instrument that may be used to determine the perceptions
of seafarers on whether or not captains, chief engineers and managers
that work for commercial ships practice favoritism. The first-level
factorial structure of the scale was tested by using the AMOS 21
software. As a result of the first-level confirmatory factor analysis
(CFA) of the scale, 2 items were removed from the model due to errors,
and the analysis was repeated. The goodness of fit values obtained as a
result of the first-level CFA were within acceptable limits specified in
the literature. In the light of the findings that were obtained, it may
be stated that the measurement instrument that was developed within the
scope of this study will fill a significant gap in the relevant
literature, and it has the quality of being a measurement instrument
that could be utilized in future studies.