기업의 정당성 획득 노력과 성과: 제도주의이론 관점에서 본기업의 지속가능경영 활동과 외부 평가

This paper aims to examine whether the organization’s effort to obtain legitimacy leads to actual legitimacy acquisition. The study inquires corporate sustainable management practices, which have rapidly spread worldwide, from the perspective of institutional theory. To find out whether efforts to obtain legitimacy, such as publishing sustainability report, have a positive effect on external assessments of sustainable management such as inclusion of DJSI(Dow Jones Sustainability Index), and whether corporate characteristics, firm size and stakeholder pressure moderates this relationship, data from domestic companies subject to the DJSI evaluation from 2014 to 2018 are used for empirical test. The analysis confirmed that the efforts to obtain legitimacy had a positive effect on the performance of the legitimacy acquisition. We also found that firm size and stakeholder pressure have negative moderating effects on the main effect. While the prior studies in the institutional theory literature mainly focused on legitimacy-seeking behaviors as the dependent variable, this paper examines whether such legitimacy-seeking efforts actually result in the positive evaluations. This study also suggests that it is necessary to differentiate efforts depending on corporate characteristics and environmental factors affecting the legitimacy obtaining.