This study, first of all, attempted to examine respectively the effect of seamen’s satisfactions to the welfare programs on their self-efficacy, and then to identify the effect of the self-efficacy on seamen’s professional consciousness. In other words, the primary purpose of this research is to verify the intermediating effect of seamen’s self-efficacy. So, this paper investigated the relationship how seamen’s satisfactions to the welfare programs had an indirect effect on their professional consciousness through the self-efficacy as a mediating variable.
To achieve the specific objective, this study inquires about theories of seamen’s welfare programs, self-efficacy and professional consciousness through empirical and theoretical literature reviews in general, and the model and hypotheses of study are made as researching several studies about the variables.
The following hypotheses in this study are developed for the research objectives.
Hypothesis 1-1: The seamen’s satisfaction to company welfare program would have a positive effect on their self-efficacy.
Hypothesis 1-2: The seamen’s satisfaction to social welfare program would have a positive effect on their self-efficacy.
Hypothesis 2: The seamen’s self-efficacy would intermediately have a positive effect on their professional consciousness.
Hypothesis 3-1: The seamen’s satisfaction to company welfare program would directly have a positive effect on professional consciousness.
Hypothesis 3-2: The seamen’s satisfaction to social welfare program would directly have a positive effect on professional consciousness.
To conclude, the satisfaction to most of the social welfare programs affected positively to the professional consciousness, but one to the part of the company welfare programs did that. Therefore, in the company welfare programs, shipping companies should strengthen the strength of some programs to be confirmable the statistical significance, and make a chance to heighten the self-efficacy and professional consciousness. Otherwise, they have to make up for the weakness of others not, and then re-build the existing programs or develop the new programs.