Identifying and Modelling Trustworthiness Competencies of Cluster Development Agents (CDAs)

While trustworthiness is seen as an important factor in success of cluster development agents (CDAs), its antecedent competencies were not identified. Against this gap, the current study seeks to explore the scope and sequence of CDAs’ trustworthiness competencies, highlighting the importance of paying attention to cultivating those competencies. Conducting a number of semi-structured interviews as well as one Interactive Management (IM) session which was empowered by using Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) software, 6 trustworthiness competencies seem to be important for CDAs were identified, including: Proficiency, Altruism, Acceptability, Ability to alert stakeholders, Expectation identification ability, and Ability to make cooperation. More importantly, the interdependencies amongst those 6 competencies were identified and modelled, shedding light on the priority and weight of each of those competencies as antecedents of CDAs’ trustworthiness. As the theoretical implementation, this study expressed the importance of trustworthiness for CDAs and modelled the antecedent competencies which need to be obtained by CDAs if they are to be trusted by their clients. If a cluster clients do now trust their agent, they should not be blamed. The trustee need to cultivate those pre-requirement competencies if s/he wants to be trustworthy. As the practical implementation, the findings of this study provide a coherent curriculum for enhancing CDAs’ trustworthiness competencies. This curriculum should be implemented by the economic and development organisations who are dealing with training and preparing agents to take role in activating and extending industrial clusters in different countries.