52 The Influences of Leaders’ Negative Implicit Followership Theories on Employees’Work Behaviors: A DualPathway Model into passive followership, active followership, and proactive followership. On the other hand, Sy (2010) focuses on how leaders form employee-oriented IFTs, uses prototypes to represent the IFTs, and adopts the structure of a second-order factor to manifest the relationships of these prototypes. Specifically, Sy (2010) divides leaders’ IFTs into six prototypes: three are positive (i.e., industry, enthusiasm, and good citizenship), and the other three are negative or the so-called antiprototypes (i.e., conformity, insubordination, and incompetence). While positive and negative prototypes are opposite in terms of their valences, they are not the opposite ends of a continuum. An employee with low levels of positive prototypes is an employee lacking industry, enthusiasm, and good citizenship, but this characterization does not mean that the employee reflects high levels of negative prototypes like conformity, insubordination, and incompetence. Empirically and theoretically, positive and negative prototypes have their unique nature and can be treated as mutually orthogonal concepts (Whiteley et al., 2012). As Sy (2010) has developed a well-structured scale measuring leaders’ six prototypes, we follow his typology of leaders’ IFTs to conduct the current empirical study. Furthermore, previous research has provided explanations about why leaders’ PIFTs could enhance employee job performance (e.g., Whiteley et al., 2012). Insofar as leaders’ PIFTs are leaders’ intrinsic positive assumptions, these assumptions motivate the leaders to adopt more supportive leadership styles, which can augment employees’ self-efficacy and their willingness to exert effort at work, ultimately helping employees achieve impressive performance goals (Eden, Geller, Gewirtz, Gordon-Terner, Inbar, Liberman, Pass, Salomon-Segev, and Shalit, 2000). Based on the similar rationale, researchers have regarded leaders’ NIFTs as having a negative effect on employee job performance (Whiteley et al., 2012). Although such speculation seems plausible, we assert that researchers should not only support it with more proof but also should explore more details in the relationship between leaders’ NIFTs and employee work outcomes. In the present study, we propose that at least two noticeably distinct psychological processes are involved in the relationship mentioned above: an emotional process and a work-cognition process (or an empowerment process). We adopt affective events theory and psychological empowerment theory to respectively explain these two processes. 2.2 The Effects of Leaders’ NIFTs on Employees’ Work Outcomes: The Emotional Process Affective Events Theory (AET) argues that the occurrence of work events elicits
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODg3MDU=