Managing culturally diverse maritime human resources as a shipping company’s core competency

ABSTRACT

The last few years a great body of research focused on the problems observed in the shipping industry due to the mix of different nationalities on board. Herein, the problem is observed in the managerial level, and specifically to the applied crew management strategies and the philosophy of the shipping companies regarding the issue of multiculturalism. The present paper seeks to elevate the value of human resources in shipping and to underline the potentials that human resource management and cultural diversity management have as a shipping company’s core competency. In a triangulated theoretical framework, the combination of resource-based view, human resource management, and cultural diversity management leads to a framework of choices which include strategies for the management of maritime human resources’ cultural diversity. The paper analyses the practical application of the proposed strategies and the fulfilment of the criteria required for turning crew management to a core competency and gaining sustainable competitive advantage from human resources.

KEYWORDS:

• Maritime human resources
• resource-based view
• sustainable competitive advantage
• cultural diversity
• seafarers
• crew management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Barney (1991) first introduced the VRIN framework for analysing the firm’s internal resources, standing for Valuable (‘V’), Rare (‘R’), Imperfectly imitable (‘I’), and Non-substitutable (‘N’). The VRIN framework has been later improved to VRIO (Barney 1995), where the ‘O’ stands for Organisation’s capability to support and deliver the valuable, rare, and inimitable resource.