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.