Resilience, sense of self-efficacy, and risk-taking in the context of task performance during ship simulator training

Background Educating sailors requires intensive training, which involves highly specialized ship simulators. This is due to the crew’s responsibility for the safety of the people on board and the simultaneous risk of making improper decisions under time pressure and with insufficient data. Thus far, empirical data on the role of personal psychological resources in the process of sailor skills training have been lacking. Participants and procedure Fifty cadets of the Navigation and Naval Weapons Faculty and 51 cadets of the Mechanical and Electrical Engineering Faculty of the Polish Naval Academy in Gdynia, Poland, participated in the study. Task performance during ship simulator training was assessed. Additionally, the participants completed the General Self-Efficacy Scale, the Brief Resilience Scale, the Questionnaire of Stimulating and Instrumental Risk, and the Status-Driven Risk Taking Scale. Results Three subgroups were distinguished based on their levels of task performance and the psychological variables measured. Cadets who achieved the highest task performance during simulator training simultaneously reported the highest sense of self-efficacy and resilience, average acceptance of instrumental risk, status-driven risk and its subdimensions, as well as the highest acceptance of stimulating risk. Conclusions Individual differences such as resilience, sense of self-efficacy, and risk acceptance have a different configuration among individuals who achieved the highest task performance on ship simulators. Identifying individuals with the optimal configuration of these variables may be useful for designing education and development processes for officers, although this requires further studies.