Page 116 - SUSTAINABILITY ISSUES & COVID-19

Public opinion is assessed by sentiment analysis, a program that recognizes subjectivity in a text and transforms it
into a sentiment score to indicate organizational legitimacy (B Pang & L Lee, 2008). Consequently, an organization
that wants to appear reputable in front of society needs to be careful with every information on social media that
potentially constructs public opinion on the organization. Therefore, Linke and Zerfass (2013) introduced a detailed
SMG framework to organize members’ social media activities. The organized use of social media encourages positive
interaction and increases favorable sentiments as the primary source to compute organizational legitimacy.

No prior research investigates the relationship between SMG and organizational legitimacy. Previous research from
Linke and Zerfass (2013) introduces SMG’s regulatory framework to achieve an organization’s online communication
goals without relating them to organization legitimacy. Others research studied the implementation of SMG to reduce
organizational risk (Haynes, 2016), encourage members’ participation in improving transparency (Dreyer & Ziebarth,
2014), impose strict boundaries for the use of social media by employees (J. M. Parker, Marasi, James, & Wall, 2019),
restrict the private use of employees’ social media (van den Berg & Verhoeven, 2017), and examine the effect on
corporate social responsibilities in organizations (Stohl, Etter, Banghart, & Woo, 2017). However, no prior research
attempts to find the direct connection between SMG and organizational legitimacy although some researchers have
introduced the quantitative measurement of organizational legitimacy from the public perception (Etter et al., 2019; Y.
Wang & Fikis, 2019). Therefore, this research gap will be explored in this study.

There is also compelling evidence that an organization’s internal characteristics might influence SMG’s effectivity on
organizational legitimacy. Schein (1985) stated that organizational cultures, a set of shared values and norms, influence
how members perceive and interact with each other and their environment. Dyck, Walker, and Caza (2019) found
that organizational culture is linked to specific financial, social, and ecological well-being outcomes. Other research
revealed that organizational culture positively affects firm performance (Upadhyay & Kumar, 2020) and management
innovations (Alofan, Chen, & Tan, 2020). Therefore, this study considers the effect of organizational culture on the
relationship between SMG and organization legitimacy.

Additionally, organizational types also influence the effectiveness of policies. Prior research views organizational
types from different perspectives, such as by profit orientation (Bretschneider & Parker, 2016; Rainey & Bozeman,
2000), by state ownership (Mariotti & Marzano, 2019; Tang, 2019), or by the portion of public ownership in the capital
structure (Campa, 2019; Mantzari, Sigalas, & Hines, 2017). As predicted by institutional theory, these findings found that
organizational types vary the result of policy implementation.

This research attempts to find empirical evidence on the relationship between SMG and organizational legitimacy.
Furthermore, this research also considers the moderating effect of organizational cultures and organizational types in
implementing SMG. Hence, the interdisciplinary approach is used by using two streams of literature. Legitimacy theory
is applied to understand how SMG affects organizational legitimacy (Deegan, 2019). Then, the institutional theory is
applied to understand the impact of organizational cultures and types. This theory posits that firms’ social context
influences organizations’ behavior (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). Therefore, organizations with a similar culture and type are
expected to have a similar outcome regarding SMG’s effectivity on organizational legitimacy.

This study contributes to the literature in the following ways. Firstly, this research enriches the literature of the
association between SMG and organizational legitimacy and how it varies given the inherent characteristic such as
organizational cultures and types. Secondly, this study recommends future researchers about the set of instruments to
measure social media government and organizational culture in Indonesian. The researcher also shares this research’s
weakness and the difficulty experienced during the data collection process to help the next researchers anticipate the
same issues. Lastly, this research also demonstrates how to conduct sentiment analysis on Indonesian social media to
measure organizational legitimacy.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Fist, several literature reviews are conducted to build hypotheses. Then,
the research design is explained. Next, the analysis regarding SMG and an organization’s legitimacy is conducted. It
might vary given the inherent characteristic such as organizational cultures and types. In the end, conclusions are
drawn with some limitations and suggestions.

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