Abstract:
In a socio-economic context with few standards and few constraints, where public companies are struggling to achieve their economic and social utility objectives, managers continue to enjoy the confidence of institutional and supervisory governance bodies, and to increase their private consumption. In this troubled context, the managerial and financial deviances orchestrated in these companies and conveyed to the public by the media have strongly contributed to discrediting the governance mechanisms of these economic entities and calling into question their quality. By placing this research in this context, it aims to study the governance of public companies with a view to assessing its quality and understanding the roots of their leaders. The interpretative epistemological stance adopted favours a qualitative approach based on a multiple-case study. Baumard and Ibert's “Forward -backward” model (2014, P.117) inspired data collection from a sample of Cameroonian public companies. The results show that governance quality is not part of the organizational objectives of these entities and is therefore not subject to any kind of evaluation. Endowed with de facto powers, these mechanisms work, but lack any real power to sanction, encourage, limit or renew managers' terms of office, in a context where the quality of governance and the level of managerial rooting are evolving in opposite directions. This paradox inspired the idea of a political instrumentalization of governance bodies, and discussions of the results led to the proposal of evaluation items for the governance quality index of public companies.
Keywords: Quality of Governance, Public Enterprise, Entrenchment, Rooting, Board of Director, Performance.
