Future officers’ views on leadership : A Finnish vessels perspective

Abstract

This thesis is a study on leadership from the perspective of a maritime student with good amounts of experience from onboard training. We intended to find out what the students of Novia UAS have perceived the leadership to be onboard and how they would see those same situations with optimal leadership and what do they expect that to be. Our intention was to find out how much these differ from each other. The study starts with an overview of the study of leadership and a literature review.

To find these things out, we recruited students from Novia UAS who fit the parameters set out for the interviewees. We then had interviews face-to-face or online via Microsoft teams. We then made those interview answers into shorter data points, grouped them into tables and analyzed those. The interviews were longer than expected and the data we got from them was good. As a result, we concluded that the leadership onboard Finnish flagged vessels is seen as adequate and the leadership styles utilized by the leaders are mostly what was found to be optimal. We included some suggestions on improving leadership onboard considering cadets like the ones we interviewed and added some suggestions for future research.