Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) hybridizing toward the market domain by adopting business practices has sparked an ever-growing debate. There is research showing a rather positive effect on organizational legitimacy. However, considering the literature discussing other performance dimensions (e.g., social effectiveness), this trend is argued to erode the prosocial underpinnings of NPOs, increasingly leaving their stakeholders wondering what distinguishes them from business enterprises. When examining these previous studies, most research only focuses on one dimension of organizational legitimacy and/or one type of stakeholder. In this study, we aim to provide a more fine-grained picture of how nonprofit-business hybridity impacts nonprofit legitimacy by adopting (a) a multi-dimensional understanding of legitimacy and (b) a multi-stakeholder perspective. We draw on survey data from Flemish NPOs to sample two matched pairs of opposite cases, i.e., a ‘low’ and ‘high’ hybridized NPO for qualitative examination. Our findings suggest that nonprofit-business hybridity is significantly detrimental for stakeholders who are closely involved, and beneficial in the eyes of stakeholders who are more distant from the organization.

非营利组织（NPO）通过采用商业惯例向市场领域进发，引发了越来越多的争论。有研究表明对组织合法性有相当积极的影响。但是，考虑到讨论其他绩效维度（例如，社会有效性）的文献，这种趋势被认为侵蚀了NPO的亲社会基础，越来越多的利益相关者想知道它们与商业企业之间的区别。在审查这些先前的研究时，大多数研究仅关注组织合法性的一个维度和/或一种类型的利益相关者。在这个研究中，我们旨在通过采用（a）对合法性的多维理解和（b）多方利益相关者的观点，为非营利组织与商业的混合如何影响非营利组织的合法性提供更细致的描述。我们利用佛兰德NPO的调查数据对两个配对的相对病例进行抽样，即对“低”和“高”杂交NPO进行定性检查。我们的研究结果表明，非营利组织与企业的混合对那些密切参与的利益相关者是有害的，并且在与组织距离更远的利益相关者的眼中是有益的。