Institutionalized Stagnation in a Media House: A Grounded Theory of Organizational Culture Dysfunction at a Media House in Zimbabwe

Abstract ―​

State-owned broadcasters in Southern Africa are being asked to behave commercially while still carrying the cultural legacy of a government department. This study examines the organizational culture challenges confronting a media house in Zimbabwe, a broadcaster that recorded a profit in 2019 followed by three consecutive years of losses, reaching record low in 2022 in 2022. A concurrent embedded mixed-methods design anchored in pragmatism was used. The qualitative strand comprised ten semi-structured interviews with senior managers, long-serving employees and former staff, analysed through Strauss and Corbin's open, axial and selective coding with analytic memoing in Atlas.ti and NVivo; saturation was reached at the eighth interview. The quantitative strand surveyed 208 employees (response rate 99.5%) on fifteen culture-challenge items (Cronbach's α = 0.973). Survey results showed near-unanimous agreement that resistance to change (99.5%), leadership style (98.1%) and the difficulty of building a supportive work environment (97.1%) shape the media house's culture, while 92.8% rejected the claim that the media house nurtures continuous learning or addresses diversity and inclusion. Coding of 246 open codes produced the core theme of Institutionalised Stagnation: a culture of fragmentation, fear and neglect perpetuating paralysis. The study theorises an Entrenched Dysfunction Framework in which a Codification–Entrenchment Cycle, a Psychological Extraction Cycle and a Communication–Execution Failure Cycle lock the organisation into a pathological equilibrium. The findings imply that piecemeal reforms will fail unless leadership stability, psychological safety and fair resource allocation are addressed simultaneously.