Incompetency and Competency Training: Improving Executive Skills in Sensemaking, Framing Issues, and Making Choices

This book covers theory and practice of competency and incompetency training. ‘Incompetency training’ includes formal and informal instruction that consciously (purposively) or unconsciously imparts knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior (including procedures) that are useless, inaccurate, misleading, and/or will lower performance outcomes of the trainee versus no training or training using alternative training methods. This book offers an early workbench model of incompetency training theory which proposes that executives and associates in firms, academia, and government organizations consciously as well as unknowingly offer incompetency training in many contexts. The evidence so far has shown that increasing trainees' vigilance and ability to recognize exposure to incompetency-training may help trainees to decrease the effectiveness (impact) of exposures to incompetency training―advancing incompetency training theory and knowledge of incompetency training practice may be necessary conditions for remedying negative outcomes that follow from trainees receiving such training. The book uses a series of laboratory experiments to elicit on tools advocated in the literature as aids in increasing incompetency and/or competency, and provides a comprehensive review of the literature on (in)competency training.

Arch G. Woodside is Professor of Marketing, Carroll School of Management, Boston College. He is a Fellow and Member of the Royal Society of Canada, American Psychological Association, Association of Psychological Sciences, Society for Marketing Advances, International Academy for the Study of Tourism, Global Information and Knowledge Academy. He is a recipient (2013) of an Honorary Doctorate Degree, University of Montreal. He is the Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Business Research.

Rouxelle de Villiers, Rouxelle completed doctoral research about the development of decision competencies in managerial students and business executives. Combining her postgraduate studies in marketing and her years of experience in management and executive development, Rouxelle is interested in what teaching methods and decision support aids will result in greater levels of decision competency in students and practitioners. She is the recipient of the Top Faculty Teaching University–Wide Award, Auckland University of Technology for 2012.

Roger Marshall, after a New Zealand business career of some twenty years, Roger read for a PhD in consumer psychology from the University of Western Australia in 1990. Since that time Dr Marshall has been actively engaged in research. Although he has published extensively - in areas such as advertising, family decision- making, personality in marketing, brand equity and retail pricing practice - his main research interests at this time are in marketing of high technology, relationship marketing and industrial buying centre dynamics. He is the Editor in Chief, Australasian Journal of Marketing.