When Is Legitimating Legitimate? An Exploration of Health and Safety Professionals’ Use of the ‘Legitimating’ Tactic When Attempting to Influence Work Health and Safety

Abstract

The role of legitimating, or reference to regulation and governance structures as an influence tactic, has recently been in the spotlight in health and safety management. An increasingly negative hue on ‘legitimating’ has emerged from this discourse, yet there is a lack of empirical research on when and why work health and safety (WHS) professionals employ this tactic. Utilising a constructivist grounded theory approach, we interviewed WHS professionals (n = 30) to explore their specific influencing objectives and factors that either promote or limit the use of legitimating. We found that WHS professionals adopted a nuanced approach to legitimating contingent on influencing objectives (e.g., managing regulated hazards) and situational factors (e.g., organizational culture). We conclude that the pervasively negative hue placed on ‘legitimating’ may undermine the importance of this tactic when managing upwards as in some circumstances, legitimating may be conflated with the influence tactic of ‘rational persuasion’, especially in WHS roles employed to assist organizational decision-makers with legal compliance.