ABSTRACT
Leadership is one of the most recurring topics in human resources literature. For sailors, leadership is something that occurs naturally on board ship and it is probably the key concept in this type of organization. The interdependence, and the limited availability of resources make a ship a closed system where the concepts of leader and typical leadership that are handled in the conventional literature must be adapted to their own field. In the maritime field, leadership has always been a skill that must be learned on board, but with mixed results, since on many occasions there has been a lack of a good role model or simply insufficient inborn leadership skills. The differences between the implicit ideas that subordinates have about leadership and the leader’s own behaviors determine the status of the leader. Research by Bernard M. Bass and Bass and Ralph Melvin Stogdill states that there are three types of leadership: the transactional, the transformational, and the laissez-faire.
