Does a Negative Event Impact Legitimacy?

Abstract

Legitimacy is a must for organizational success. Hence, those organizations able to gain legitimacy can increase effectiveness during periods of crisis or threats. Based on organizational perception management, which focuses its attention on those actions that aim to influence audiences’ perceptions of an organization. This paper presents multiple experiments to understand how different strategies executing verbal accounts can influence people’s perceptions of legitimacy. Results demonstrate that a threatening event will negatively affect legitimacy perception, whatever the response of the organization is. However, verbal accounts are also an important organizational perception management tactic to impact the perceptions of legitimacy during these threatening situations, as a defensive response will have a worse behavior on perceived legitimacy than the accommodative one. Furthermore, the type of event will also have a direct influence on certain dimensions of legitimacy, opening a wide range of actions to be taken depending on the characteristics of the event.