Legitimacy Judgments Research Articles

Comprehensive Preview Decision Method for Direction and Speed of Intelligent Vehicle Based on Rules and Learning

Decision-making is a key part of autonomous driving systems. Human-like decision-making in complex scenarios is important for enhancing drivers’ trust in and acceptance of autonomous driving systems. In order to improve their human-like features and their adaptability to complex scenarios, this paper proposes a comprehensive preview decision method for direction and speed based on rules and learning. First, a decision-making structure including maneuvering ability judgment, motion trajectory prediction, safety judgment, legitimacy judgment, comprehensive performance evaluation, and parameters learning is presented. Second, a learning method for the longitudinal safety distance threshold based on a BP neural network is introduced. Third, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is used to learn the comprehensive performance evaluation weight coefficient for different driving styles. Finally, the DJI AD4CHE dataset is processed and used to train the parameters. Car-following and lane-changing scenarios are simulated to verify the effectiveness of decision-making. The simulation results show that the proposed method can reflect human-like decision-making in multiple scenarios.

Measuring First-Order Legitimacy Judgments: Development of the Corporate Profession Legitimacy Scale

Measuring First-Order Legitimacy Judgments: Development of the Corporate Profession Legitimacy Scale

Weak in ability but still follow what the headquarters asks: a legitimacy‐based view of MNC employees' adoption of English

This paper advances a legitimacy‐based view on what factors determine multinational corporation (MNC) employees' adoption of English at work. We posit that legitimacy judgment represents an alternative mechanism, other than language ability, for explaining MNC employees' response to headquarters' corporate language policy. The hypotheses were confirmed in two studies with mixed‐methods (experiments; semi‐structured interviews), involving MNC employees in China. Our findings verified that corporate language policy increases positive legitimacy judgment, which in turn enhances employees' adoption of English at work. Further analysis showed that language ability moderates the mediating effect of legitimacy judgment, such that this effect is stronger for employees with lower language ability. Semi‐structured interviews confirmed the experimental findings and brought more insight into why and how Chinese employees adopt English in daily work. This paper contributes to the research on corporate language policy, legitimacy judgment, and cross‐border management in Asia Pacific.

Public reactions to instances of workplace gender discrimination.

The number of people witnessing or experiencing gender discrimination at work is still high around the globe. While the existing literature has investigated potential mechanisms underlying gender discrimination and the consequences of experiencing gender discrimination at work, it remains unclear how third-party observers-as opposed to employees or coworkers-react to specific instances of workplace gender discrimination. The results of six experiments demonstrate that (a) people in general judge organizational decisions that discriminate against individual male (vs. female) workers as more legitimate and (b) this difference in legitimacy judgments is significantly greater among women than men. This discrepancy in legitimacy judgments occurs because women (more than men) consider the collective situation of female and male workers when judging the legitimacy of organizational decisions that discriminate against individual workers based on gender. These findings document how group-level concerns shape people's legitimacy judgments of organizational decisions discriminating against individuals and equip organizations and policymakers with a better understanding of people's polarized opinions regarding gender discrimination at the workplace. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Legitimizing the game: how gamers' personal experiences shape the emergence of grassroots collective action in esports

PurposeThis paper studies early stages of actor mobilization for institutional change within Swedish esports.Design/methodology/approachThe authors employ interpretative phenomenological analysis.FindingsThe authors’ findings explain how actors become motivated to act in critical reflections linked to conflicting legitimacy judgments and emotionally charged personal struggles. Moreover, the findings show how, as actors get activated in collective action, they identify efficacy lines around valid domains and experience emotionally charged collective endeavors. Furthermore, the findings explain how particularities in early experiences project legitimacy aspirations that orient collective action toward validity ends and particular values and ideals shaping actors' grassroots movements.Originality/valueThis study adds to legitimacy and institutional change theory through individual actors' perspectives, providing key insights into how they are motivated, activated, and oriented. This study is the first to investigate grassroots activists' personal stories in esports.

Tracing the legitimacy of Artificial Intelligence: A longitudinal analysis of media discourse

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most relevant technologies of our time. During the last decade, AI has made major technological breakthroughs most recently in the space of generative AI. This development is enabled by an increase in computing power, a decrease in its price, and the emergence of ubiquitous computing, resulting in vast amounts of storable and processable data. However, the diffusion of AI depends on its legitimacy in society, whereby legitimacy is understood as the congruence between organizational activities and their cultural environment. This study aims at understanding the process whereby AI is being (de)legitimated across key industries and over time. To capture and trace the process of legitimation, we rely on media coverage as a form of societal discourse reflecting the legitimation process of AI. We find that the legitimation process gathers momentum in the mid-2010s and the legitimacy of AI increases over time. Furthermore, we identify four types of legitimacy discourse, which integrate sentiment, specific media frames, and appeals of persuasion. Uncovering the four types of legitimacy discourse, we aim at supporting organizations seeking to understand the legitimacy of specific AI applications and how these legitimacy judgments can shift.

Theorizing the Grey Area between Legitimacy and Illegitimacy

AbstractDespite a proliferation of research on legitimacy, the ‘grey area’ that lies between legitimacy and illegitimacy remains undertheorized. Responding to calls for further research, we clarify the construct of legitimacy and extend legitimacy theory by providing a conceptual framework for analyzing the legitimacy‐illegitimacy continuum. First, we propose three novel legitimacy states between legitimacy and illegitimacy – conditional legitimacy, unknown legitimacy, and conditional illegitimacy – and elaborate on the distinct qualitative characteristics of the five legitimacy states. Second, we offer a model of the dynamics of legitimacy state change and the (in)stability of the issue‐specific reference framework that is used to judge them. Third, we explain how our legitimacy states bridge the research streams on legitimacy judgment formation and legitimation strategies. By doing so, we integrate these research streams and enumerate discursive strategies for each state. Our article contributes to a more robust understanding of both how legitimacy states can be conceptualized and analyzed in future research and how they can be dealt with in managerial practice.

MNC Employees’ Adoption and Adaptation of Corporate Practice: A Legitimacy-Based View

This paper theorizes and examines the micro-institutional process of corporate practice implementation in multinational corporations (MNCs). Drawing from the social-psychological approach to institutional theory, we focus on the role of legitimacy judgment in explaining MNC employees’ diverse behavioral responses to organizational and institutional pressures. Our theoretical model was examined in two studies regarding common corporate language (CCL) based on 228 MNC employees in the United Kingdom and United States (survey) and 105 MNC employees in China (experiment). The findings reveal that legitimacy judgment bolsters MNC employees’ passive adoption of the CCL practice but reduces their active adaptation in the form of code-switching. Further, employees form legitimacy judgment based on authorization, external endorsement, and the interaction of authorization and external endorsement. Intriguingly, employees’ adaptation, rather than their adoption, drives knowledge sharing in their MNCs, suggesting acquiescence to a taken-for-granted practice could undermine a useful outcome. Our study advances the theoretical understanding of corporate practice implementation in MNCs, legitimacy judgment, and the CCL practice.

Human Rights, Multinational Enterprises, and Legitimacy

This paper attempts to explain why, in similar contexts, multinational enterprises (MNEs) respond differently to human rights questions, and why external audiences appear to tolerate these differences. Our explanation focuses on the perceived legitimacy of MNE human rights actions. This approach recognizes that organizations are actors that make legitimacy assessments, rather than mere legitimacy objects. We conceptualize organizational human rights attitudes and reasons for action, and we show how the two interact. We relate the norms that are used in legitimacy judgments, and the way that they are interpreted in different contexts, to different MNE human rights attitudes. Our analysis yields new predictions of the factors that might lead MNEs to adopt active, passive, or non-engagement human rights attitudes.

The Behavioral Implications of Legitimacy: An Experimental Approach

Legitimacy is assumed to have behavioral implications and to constitute an important antecedent of institutional stability and institutional change. Most research, however, focused on the perceptual component of legitimacy or studied intentions to act towards legitimacy objects through hypothetical experiments. To advance the understanding of the behavioral implications of legitimacy, we conducted three experiments to examine the effects of normative and instrumental concerns on support for a legitimacy object. Moreover, we compare the effects of normative and instrumental concerns on behavior with the effects of both concerns on two types of individual-level legitimacy judgments: propriety and validity beliefs. We found that normative concerns affect propriety beliefs and the degree of support for legitimacy objects. By contrast, instrumental concerns significantly influence the degree of support for legitimacy objects, but they seem to have no impact on propriety and validity beliefs. Importantly, eliciting individuals’ propriety and validity beliefs reduced the influence of instrumental concerns on their support for a legitimacy object. Our findings demonstrate that the relationship between legitimacy judgments and behavior is more complex than commonly assumed and suggests that it is essential to include behavioral measures in experimental research on legitimacy.

Collaboration in Purpose-driven Organizations

Cooperation and coordination are two complementary aspects of collaboration that are essential for firms. As firms articulate a prosocial purpose and embed societal goals into their strategies, routines, and culture, new coordination challenges arise. In contrast, such challenges do not exist when firms only implement peripheral corporate social initiatives and did not need to extend their attention beyond cooperation, which relates to employees’ motivation. In this paper, we highlight that prosocial purpose-driven firms should not care about their employees’ prosociality, but they should also ensure that they manage to coordinate those employees. We found that legitimacy judgments mediate the positive impact of employees’ prosociality on the level of collaboration a firm reaches. We also found that this mediating effect is stronger for prosocial purpose-driven firms relative to non prosocial purpose-driven firms.

How Subordinates Evaluate and Respond to the Legitimacy of Leader-Member Exchange Differentiation

Drawing on legitimacy framework and equity theory, this paper examines subordinates’ evaluating process of leader-member exchange differentiation (LMXD) legitimacy and their subsequent responses. Specifically, we use LMXD deservingness (i.e., subordinates’ perception that those who develop high-quality relationships with leaders make high contributions to their group) to capture subordinates’ legitimacy judgments of LMXD. And we propose that LMXD deservingness will mediate the relationships of LMXD with subordinates’ in-role performance and interpersonal helping. Furthermore, we expect that the cross-level effects of LMXD will be moderated by the characteristic of team context, that is, perceived team competition. Using surveys from 207 leaders and 1163 subordinates, we found support that LMXD deservingness mediated the effect of LMXD on subordinates’ in-role performance but not on subordinates’ interpersonal helping. In addition, LMXD’s direct impact on LMXD deservingness and indirect impact on subordinates’ in-role performance via LMXD deservingness were more negative when perceived team competition is high rather than low. Theoretical implications and future research directions are discussed.

When Do Evaluators Publicly Express Their Legitimacy Judgments? An Inquiry into the Role of Peer Endorsement and Evaluative Mode

Legitimacy theory describes how individuals evaluate an organization’s behavior, form propriety evaluations, and subsequently decide whether to publicly express their legitimacy judgments. These individual judgments are influenced by sources of collective validity, for example, from recognized authority or from peer endorsement. Whereas most research on this topic has focused on the effects of authority, we study the influence of peer endorsement on the public expression of legitimacy judgments. Additionally, we assess evaluators’ preparedness to expend cognitive effort, that is, their evaluative mode, as an important condition under which judgment expressions are made. We present a set of three vignette experiments and one field study, all situated in social media that are quickly becoming the dominant setting for the expression of legitimacy judgments. This research provides new evidence that peer endorsement stimulates evaluators to express their judgments, particularly for evaluators who expend limited cognitive effort. Additionally, we find that evaluators in the active and passive evaluative modes act differently when their propriety evaluations are based on instrumental, moral, or relational considerations. These findings extend current legitimacy theory about how peer endorsement functions as a source of validity and when individual evaluators decide to publicly express their legitimacy judgments. This is important because individuals’ public expressions can bring about a cascade of judgments that change the consensus on an organization’s legitimacy, potentially contributing to institutional change. History: This paper has been accepted for the Organization Science Special Issue on Experiments in Organizational Theory. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.1604 .

Why do good deeds go unnoticed? A perspective on the legitimacy Judgment of social entrepreneurship in China

ABSTRACT The support of entrepreneurial partners is key to social entrepreneurship and the continuous creation of social value. However, social entrepreneurship in China does not receive sufficient support from venture partners, contrary to the moral spirit of benevolence advocated by traditional Chinese Confucianism. From the perspective of the legitimacy judgement of entrepreneurial partners and using information processing theory, we construct a theoretical model of the interaction between uncertainty and entrepreneurial passion in entrepreneurial engagement and test hypotheses with data from 325 questionnaires completed in China. The results show that uncertainty negatively affects social entrepreneurial engagement, entrepreneurial passion positively affects social entrepreneurial engagement, and legitimacy judgement plays a mediating role in the relationship among uncertainty, entrepreneurial passion, and entrepreneurial engagement. The interaction between uncertainty and entrepreneurial passion affects entrepreneurial engagement through pragmatic legitimacy judgements and moral legitimacy judgements but not through relational legitimacy judgements. We examine why it is difficult for meritorious Chinese social entrepreneurial activities to obtain sufficient support from the perspective of entrepreneurial partners’ judgements, extending the legitimacy judgement theory of social entrepreneurship from the perspective of interaction between individuals and the context.

Mitigating Intergroup Conflict: Effectiveness of Qualifying Subjective Justice Views as an Intervention Technique in Comparison to Empathy Induction

Intergroup conflicts can be triggered and perpetuated by collective perceptions of injustice. In two experiments, we applied the qualifying of subjective justice views, a justice-focused intervention initially introduced to resolve interpersonal conflicts, and evaluated whether it can mitigate intergroup conflicts. This intervention included explicating opposing justice perceptions, explaining the dilemma structure of justice conflicts, and emphasizing that each conflict party applies different justice standards in different situations. In a realistic conflict setting, among advantaged group members, the intervention enhanced the willingness to pay monetary concessions to the out-group. This effect was mediated through an enhanced understanding of the justice dilemma (Study 2) and legitimacy judgments of the out-group’s justice claim (Studies 1 and 2). Furthermore, effects of the justice-focused intervention were compared to those of empathy induction as a benchmark to evaluate the effectiveness. The comparison provided additional evidence for the effectiveness of the justice-focused intervention to mitigate intergroup conflicts.

Discursive strategies for internal legitimacy: Narrating the alternative organizational form

A significant body of academic work has explored the ways in which hybrid organizations seek to secure external legitimacy. However, there is a more limited understanding of the ways in which organizational units in hybrid organizations seek to acquire internal legitimacy – legitimacy which is conferred by internal stakeholders. This study draws on more than a century of communications in a Dutch cooperative bank to uncover how a major organizational unit enacted distinct discursive strategies to seek internal legitimacy. The paper extends prior work by showing how internal legitimacy work – the efforts to shape, reinforce, or suppress internal legitimacy judgments – in a hybrid organization is a dynamic process whereby an internal unit generates multiple complementary narratives to promote a fit between its own attributes and the legitimacy evaluations by internal audiences. In addition, it shows how internal legitimacy work can promote this fit by attempting to manipulate not only the impressions of the internal unit's attributes, but also its audiences’ understanding of wider cultural norms of the day, on which their legitimacy judgments are based. In this vein, the paper highlights how discursive internal legitimacy work seeks to generate a taken-for-granted organizational position for the internal units concerned.

The role of media coverage in the audience’s legitimacy judgment about disruptive innovation: an empirical study of DiDi in China

ABSTRACT The novelty of disruptive innovation is often beyond our understanding, but the news media coverage can help us understand it better. News media coverage may have a different effect on the audience’s legitimacy judgment. Positive news media coverage may get higher audience’s legitimacy judgment and negative news media coverage may get lower audience’s legitimacy judgment. Besides, different news sources may have a different effect on this process. Thus, from the perspective of news content analysis, what factors affect the audience’s legitimacy judgment? Does news reputation adjust the audience’s legitimacy judgment? Evidence from DiDi firm, on behalf of disruptive innovation in China, supports these questions and propositions. In line with institutional theory, we make three straight points. First, news coverage shows a significant positive relationship to the audience’s legitimacy judgment, user-oriented values and society-oriented values. Second, operational-risk and ethical-risk news coverage show a significant negative relationship to the audience’s legitimacy judgment. Third, news reputation partly moderates the audience’s legitimacy judgment to disruptive innovation at different stages. Thus, news media matters in a social setting.

The role of legitimacy and reputation judgments in users’ selection of service providers on sharing economy platforms

Information systems literature suggests that reputation is the main judgment form that captures user-related information online. Drawing on social judgment literature, we contend that a user's online characteristics and past actions are not all reputation-based, but also legitimacy-based, and that transaction stake determines whether users will use reputation or legitimacy judgment to evaluate other users. Using Airbnb, we show that level of stake in a transaction determines the judgment form (reputation or legitimacy) that guests resort to when evaluating a host. Moreover, we find that providing extensive information on a host to potential guests in low-stake transactions is counterproductive.

PERCEPTIONS OF YOUTH ABOUT PROCEDURAL AND DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE AND THEIR COOPERATION WITH POLICE

The present study aimed to investigate as to how perceptions of the youth about procedural and distributive justice influence their cooperation with police. The study was conducted on students of the University of the Punjab, Lahore. The major objective of the study was to see whether or not perceptions about police legitimacy fostered cooperation of the youth with police for collaborative crime control. A survey of the University students was carried out and a structured questionnaire was used as a tool of data collection. Data were gathered from 111 students of the five randomly selected Departments of the University of the Punjab, Lahore. The findings of thepresent study showed that the perceptions of the students about procedural justice were significantly related with their intent to cooperate with police. The respondents’ judgments about the fairness of the police seemed to be important in promoting cooperation with police. This present research indicated that perceptions of police fairness were linked with social identity which in turn was related with cooperation. Legitimacy judgments were the main drivers of cooperation. Overall, the findings of the present study showed that students had low schema about Police performance in procedural justice and they have negative notions about Police workforce for bringing harmony and stability in society.

Organizational Purpose: Legitimacy Judgments and Preference for a Company

Organizational purpose is an overarching corporate goal that reaches beyond profit maximization which to be effective must be perceived as legitimate. In this paper, we test whether legitimacy judgments about a firm’s purpose increase preference for the firm. Drawing on legitimacy-as-judgment theory and prosocial orientation literature, we expected and found using two distinct experiments that perceived collective agreement on legitimacy and personal deviations from this agreement both contribute to a higher preference for a purposeful company, while only the latter component depends on prosociality. This result holds for the moral (but not the pragmatic) dimension of legitimacy. This paper contributes to research on organizational purpose and the literature on legitimacy as judgment and has critical relevance for practice.