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Organizational Legitimacy and Stakeholder Trust in the Organization: A Feed-Forward Relationship

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Organizational Legitimacy

Abstract

The main goal of this study is to enlarge the understanding of the concept of legitimacy. In recent decades, organizational legitimacy has received a great deal of attention from researchers who have tried to establish how organizations acquire, manage, and use it. However, there is still no conceptual agreement on how organizational legitimacy should be understood and how it can be measured. This reflects the complexity in the literature about understanding this phenomenon and suggests research opportunities. This chapter aims to strengthen the understanding of the role legitimacy plays in organizations by reviewing the related literature and analyzing the relationship between legitimacy and trust. Our findings suggest that there is a positive relationship between these two concepts. Moreover, we conclude that legitimacy can be achieved in two different ways: the first via trust and the second via control. In the first instance, we found a double-loop relationship between legitimacy and trust, generating a feed-forward relationship, given that both of these concepts mutually reinforce each other. In the second instance, there is a single-loop relationship because legitimacy based on control improves stakeholders’ trust in the organization. However, there is no reciprocal impact given that the legalistic remedies used are, in fact, the substitutes of trust.

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Acknowledgments

This research is part of the Project ECO2015-71380-R funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness and the State Research Agency, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management, Faculty of Economics, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain

    Maria D. Moreno-Luzon & Odette Chams-Anturi

  2. Business School, Universidad del Norte, Barranquilla, Colombia

    Juan P. Escorcia-Caballero

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  1. Maria D. Moreno-Luzon
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  2. Odette Chams-Anturi
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  3. Juan P. Escorcia-Caballero
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Correspondence to Maria D. Moreno-Luzon .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain

    Emilio Díez-De-Castro

  2. Organizacion de Empresas Camino de Vera, Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain

    Marta Peris-Ortiz

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Moreno-Luzon, M.D., Chams-Anturi, O., Escorcia-Caballero, J.P. (2018). Organizational Legitimacy and Stakeholder Trust in the Organization: A Feed-Forward Relationship. In: Díez-De-Castro, E., Peris-Ortiz, M. (eds) Organizational Legitimacy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75990-6_18

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