Organizational legitimacy, reputation and status: Insights from micro-level measurement

Research on the micro-foundations of social evaluations requires a micro-translation 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 towards a multi-level 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 dim...