Organizational Governance and the Effectiveness of Career Management Practices in Cameroonian Press Companies, a Comparative Analysis of Governance Configurations

Abstract

Career management is a major organizational issue for attracting, developing, and retaining talent, but the existence of formal human resource practices does not guarantee their effective implementation. The literature on media governance in sub-Saharan Africa remains largely centred on the public/private dichotomy and on editorial content, and gives little attention to how the internal distribution of power, in the sense of organizational governance, affects the effective implementation of career management practices. This article examines the extent to which the governance configuration of Cameroonian press companies is associated with the effectiveness of these practices. The study draws on a 2026 survey of 82 respondents from eight Cameroonian press companies (15 managers, 67 staff members), selected for their diversity of governance rather than their statistical representativeness. Two non-strictly symmetrical questionnaires compare practices reported by managers with those perceived by employees; the analysis combines descriptive statistics, exact tests, and content analysis of open-ended responses. Drawing on Meyer and Rowan's (1977) decoupling theory together with an organizational governance framework informed by Charreaux (2011), the results show that the documented presence of an HR device does not guarantee its coherent implementation, since the gap between managers and employees reaches 70.3 points for appraisal interviews and 54.6 points for job descriptions. The concentrated patrimonial configuration presents the least favourable conditions for effectiveness, although this hierarchy among the three configurations could not be quantified beyond the contrast between the public and private poles, for which multiple employment rises from 5.6% to 91.8%. Implications concern the traceability of HR decisions, the transparency of progression criteria, and the alignment between prescribed procedures and lived practices.

Classification JEL : M54 ; L82

Paper type : Empirical Research