Organizational Legitimacy, Reputation, and Status: Insights from Micro-Level Measurement

Research on the microfoundations of social evaluations requires microtranslation of concepts and measures used in macro-organizational research. The development of valid individual-level measures of organizational legitimacy, reputation, and status presents an essential step in the advancement of organizational theory toward a multilevel perspective on these constructs. To address this research agenda, we examine the dimensions along which one can distinguish cognitive legitimacy, sociopolitical legitimacy, reputation, and status judgments, and, in a series of four studies, we develop direct, reflective measures of these social judgments at the individual evaluator level, report correlations among them, and explore associations of our measures with extant measurement instruments. The proposed scale departs from instruments proposed in the extant literature in several respects: (1) it is generalizable across different social contexts, (2) it is not affected by changes in the importance of specific dimensions, and finally, (3) it empirically discriminates among different types of social judgments and highlights areas where empirical distinctions among constructs are blurred. The findings lay the empirical foundation for more nuanced research on cognitive legitimacy, sociopolitical legitimacy, reputation, and status and shed light on previously unexplored relationships among these constructs.