From Legitimacy to Engagement: A Micro‐Level Framework for Responsible Innovation in Controversial Industries

ABSTRACT Responsible Innovation (RI) has emerged as a normative ideal to align technological advancement with ethical and societal values. However, existing RI research predominantly operates at the macro level, focusing on policy frameworks, stakeholder governance, and institutional norms, while overlooking how RI is perceived, experienced, and enacted at the employee level within organizations. This conceptual paper addresses this critical gap by proposing a micro‐level psychological framework that explains how employee perceptions of RI influence work engagement through mechanisms of trust and identification. Drawing on Social Exchange Theory (SET) and Social Identity Theory (SIT), we theorize a sequential pathway in which RI enhances organizational trust, strengthens identification with organizational values, and ultimately leads to higher employee engagement. We also introduce psychological empowerment as a moderating condition that shapes the strength of this mechanism. Although illustrated through the context of heavy industries in emerging economies, characterized by high ethical risk, environmental impact, and stakeholder scrutiny, the framework is applicable to a wider range of sectors where innovation provokes societal contestation and legitimacy challenges. This paper re‐conceptualizes RI as a dynamic, relational, and internally embedded process that must be activated by employees to achieve organizational legitimacy. We contribute to RI theory by integrating micro‐level behavioral insights into innovation ethics and by offering a novel, empirically testable model for future empirical research.