Leadership styles determine proactivity of employees - A vessel’s example

A crisis event is out of the incidence that is stressful to many people. Stressor as an objective event causes stress in an individual however the level of stress is differently experienced. The affected individuals feel that they cannot fight a crisis event with common mechanisms of dealing. Leadership styles of managers in a large degree determine the proactivity of employees in the crisis events. There can be differentiated transactional, transformational and transcendental leadership. Historically, transactional leadership had been dominated over the years on board. Nowadays, there are more accents on transformational, or even transcendental leadership. Thus, different types of check-lists are introduced to increase situational awareness amongst employees especially in emergency situations. There are also different training and drills scenarios that cover different types of crisis events where employee affected learn how to react well trained and routinely. Familiarization with the anticipated situation, and “know what to do” in the real one, decreases the level of stress among individuals, and helps to react much calmer and focused. In this paper it was analyzed what is increasing individual resources to deal with stressful situation. In addition, individual reaction depends on the hierarchy’s structure aboard; concretely leadership styles determine the proactivity of employees, which can be crucial in emergency situations. Research should be continued in the more practical examples from different types of vessels (eg through polls among seamen who are experienced in various emergencies) where it would be possible to find what is increasing individual resources to deal with stressful situations, and what kind of leadership is preferred by crewmembers, traditional or neoteric ones