Organizational Legitimacy

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is one option to foster reputation, image or legitimacy of organizations. Although institutional theories put organizational legitimacy in the center of research, we still lack research about the individual evaluation of legitimacy. Organizational legitimacy is a generalized evaluation that the organization is in accordance with relevant norms and values of the society. We empirically investigate how individual stakeholders evaluate organizational legitimacy.  

In the first project, we develop a model that demonstrates the role of attributed motives and corporate credibility for the evaluation of organizational legitimacy and test this model with an experimental vignette study. Our results show that when a corporate activity creates benefits for the firm—in addition to social benefits—individuals attribute more extrinsic motives. Extrinsic motives are ascribed when a corporation is perceived as being driven by external rewards as opposed to an altruistic commitment to a social cause. Extrinsic motives negatively affect corporate credibility and organizational legitimacy judgments. This article contributes to a better understanding of the complex process of organizational legitimacy judgment by shedding light on the individual’s perspective and expounding the relationship between       attributed motives, corporate credibility, and organizational legitimacy. (Quoted from the abstract of Jahn, Eichhorn and Brühl, 2017)

 Research partner: Dipl.-Psych. Melanie Eichhorn; Dr. Johannes Jahn, M.Sc.

Publications

Partner of Research Center