51 NTU Management Review Vol. 31 No. 3 Dec. 2021 colleagues’ assistance, the work-unit performance will suffer accordingly. Therefore, the actual influences of leaders’ NIFTs on a service organization may be very broad and worth understanding. As the empirical studies on NIFTs are still quite rare and have not examined the potential effect beyond vertical supervisor-subordinate relationships, our current study is in a strong position to yield substantial theoretical and managerial insights in this regard. 2. Theory and Hypotheses 2.1 Leaders’ Implicit Followership Theories The intrinsic assumptions attributable to leaders often predispose them to certain ways of interpreting events and shaping management styles (Sy, 2010). A famous early work on leaders’ assumptions is McGregor’s (1960) Theory X and Theory Y. Theory X proposes that employees dislike work, want to avoid responsibility, and should be strictly controlled; Theory Y proposes that employees like work, want to take responsibility, and can engage in self-management. Several decades have passed since McGregor first proposes his Theory X and Theory Y. During that time, academicians have not paid enough attention to the content or the consequences of leaders’ assumptions about employees (Sy, 2010). Until now, only a few studies have focused on this issue and have tried to unravel leaders’ implicit assumptions (cf. Junker and Van Dick, 2014). One study addressing this issue is Engle and Lord’s (1997) article discussing the content of leaders’ implicit performance theories. The authors state that both organizational leaders and organizational members rely on implicit theories to process social information and make social judgments. Engle and Lord (1997) point out that a number of traits such as “interested in work,” “conscientious,” “gives suggestions,” “hard-working,” and “independent thinker” could constitute the basis of leaders’ development of implicit theories regarding subordinates. However, Engle and Lord’s (1997) study focuses only on the attributes associated with performance, overlooking other important attributes (e.g., trustworthiness and loyalty) that could reflect a more complete profile of a follower’s role. In contrast to the rather limited scope of Engle and Lord’s (1997) study, two other recent studies have tried to broaden the scope and to clarify the content of implicit followership theory. One is a qualitative study by Carsten et al. (2010) and the other is a quantitative study by Sy (2010). Examining how employees socially construct their roles as followers, Carsten et al. (2010) divide employees’ implicit followership theories
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