Legitimacy Construction in the Presence of Multiple Validity Cues: An Experimental Investigation

How actors construe legitimacy perceptions of their social environment has been subject to considerable interest in social psychology and organization studies, with much research focusing on how collective validity cues inform individual propriety judgments. However, this research has either focused on one validity cue at a time or has assumed that multiple validity cues are congruent, thereby overlooking the complex interactions that may occur between different types of cues. In this chapter, we address this limitation by investigating the differential effects of validity cues on propriety judgments contingent on cue type (authorization versus endorsement), cue valence (positive versus negative), and the evaluator’s subject-matter expertise (low versus high). We report a vignette experiment involving a LinkedIn site of a fictitious deep-sea mining company. We find main effects of cue valence and cue type, such that positively valenced cues lead to higher propriety judgments whereas negatively valenced cues lead to lower propriety judgments, and both effects are stronger for authorization than for endorsement cues. Our findings provide important contributions to legitimacy research by demonstrating the importance of theorizing and systematically studying the role of multiple and potentially conflicting cues in the formation of legitimacy.