Legitimacy through CSR disclosures? The advantage outweighs the disadvantages

•The developed CSR dilemma model synthesizes direct positive effects and indirect negative effects of CSR on corporate legitimacy.•Socio-psychological constructs examine how CSR information is processed and evaluated.•Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) allows to analyze direct and indirect effects of CSR on legitimacy in one model.•Corporate legitimacy is measured by a new scale.•The results show that CSR communication has a positive effect on corporate legitimacy despite stakeholder skepticism.

On the one hand, CSR is regarded as a means to strengthen legitimacy; on the other hand, stakeholders might become skeptical and distrust CSR disclosures. We develop a model by assuming that CSR disclosures both directly increase and indirectly decrease a company’s legitimacy. The experimental study (N = 233) tests this CSR dilemma model by using three CSR disclosures of a commodity trading company as the stimuli, ranging from low to high communicated CSR engagement. The SEM reveals that the extent of communicated CSR has a positive effect on corporate legitimacy despite a high degree of stakeholder skepticism.