| Legitimacy is an important organizational resource, and typically is analyzed in terms of organizational conformity to the normative expectations of the external environment. Organizational conformity to external expectations may reflect systemic institutional pressures (e.g., legal requirements) or specific resource dependencies. In these instances, however, legitimacy plays no direct role in explaining organization actions. Organizational stakeholders' expectations might be explained by their standards of legitimacy, but organizational conformity reflects powerlessness in the face of institutional pressures or resource dependencies. Consequently, legitimacy's direct contribution to the explanation of organizational actions is questionable.;This empirical study offers legitimacy an explicit role in organizational actions by considering it from top management's standpoint. Executives might appeal to their own legitimacy standards in selecting organizational responses to external expectations; there might be no deterministic imperative of legitimacy. The study examines the relationship of executives' legitimacy standards and executives' perceptions of external stakeholders' legitimacy expectations to four aspects of corporate ethics management programs: their overall extent, or intensity, of development; their integration with other organizational activities; and their regulatory (i.e., control oriented) and aspirational (i.e., counseling oriented) character. To assess the relative importance of any legitimacy imperatives, the study also considers intraorganizational economic concerns in relation to ethics programs. Data were obtained from a survey distributed to executives in 990 of the 1000 largest American industrial and service firms.;Results show a prominent relationship between ethics program intensity and executives' legitimacy standards. Executive perceptions of well-defined external pressures, such as the United States Sentencing Commission guidelines for organizational defendants, also are significantly related to intensity, but concerns for generalized external pressures (e.g., firms' public visibility) and economic factors were not related to intensity. Ethics programs' integration with other organizational functions, and their regulatory and aspirational character, also were related significantly to executives' legitimacy standards. In most cases, however, external expectations and economic concerns had little if any relationship to an ethics program's character or integration.;These results show the importance of considering the operation of legitimacy expectations within and without organizations, and highlight the potential importance of focusing on executives' own standards in corporate ethics interventions. |
