In order to find out partial discharge (PD) phenomena in the cable joint due to the poor workmanship during the installation, the relationship between PD inception voltages and joint defects was investigated. For the purpose, in the joint of 22.9kV CNCV cables, electric fields were calculated for various semiconductive layer wrong positioning (WP) defects. And, PDIV were investigated through the experiments and compared with the results of electric field analysis. In all WP defect cases, the PD inception field calculated using measured PDIVs was similarly shown to be the average value of 1.84kV/mm. In addition, the calculated PDIV and the measured PDIV were almost equal, from the PDIV calculation using maximum electric fields and the measured PDIV for the normal case. Throughout this study, it is possible to analyze WP defects due to the poor workmanship and to establish better joint design for the distribution grade extruded cable system.