Measuring individual legitimacy perceptions: Scale development and validation

Abstract

To fully understand legitimacy as a complex construct, it is necessary to capture both collective perceptions and individual judgments. Much of the empirical research on legitimacy has focused on measuring the collective perceptions of groups of evaluators or critical institutions. This research develops and validates a psychometric measure of individual perceptions of pragmatic, moral, and cognitive legitimacy. Across seven studies, we demonstrate consistent reliability and scale structure, as well as convergent, discriminant, nomological, and predictive validity. We further show the generalizability and robustness of the measure across a variety of organizations and industries. This measure will advance empirical research on legitimacy by enabling researchers to capture the perceptions of individual evaluators directly and permit the comparison of results across studies.