The effects of dedication to environmental legitimacy on HEI-wide innovativeness and applications for admission: From natural resource based view

We hypothesized that dedication to environmental legitimacy is a driver for university-wide innovativeness and reputation. Using a sample of 161 colleges listed in the US News & World Report best university rankings list of 2015, we observed the impact of HEI dedication to environmental legitimacy on innovativeness and applications for admission from 2008 to 2011. We found that a higher education institution (HEI)'s dedication to environmental legitimacy increased its innovativeness. To test the dedication-application relationship, we divided our entire sample into three groups in terms of ranking and found that the positive impact of the dedication on applications was significant for the group having low-ranked HEIs. Our empirical findings suggest that dedication to environmental legitimacy such as green building initiatives serves as the foundation for the outcomes of stakeholder integration including innovativeness and reputation going beyond cost savings.