Conflicts due to cultural differences in multicultural ships: Fid-Bau Portal

Conflicts due to cultural differences in multicultural ships

Inegol, Gani Mustafa / Yildirim, Umut

The growth in global trade and technological developments in the maritime industry have increased the number of ships and their capacities. Despite the decreased size of crews in modern ships, the increased number of ships has increased the demand for qualified seafarers. Shipowners and ship operators have tried to solve the problem of this imbalance by employing seafarers, not only from their own countries, but also from other countries. Increased competition and costs have increased the number of multinational crews in the maritime trade. In ships operated with multinational crews, potential conflicts among the crewmembers due to cultural differences endanger the safety of the ship and the cargo. In this study, the literature was examined to identify conflicts due to cultural differences in multinational ships. The factors causing conflict were established as criteria by taking the opinions of human resources experts of eleven maritime enterprises and four academics, and the criteria weights were determined with the fuzzy AHP (analytic hierarchy process) method. The rankings of solution alternatives were calculated by the fuzzy TOPSIS (technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution) method.