55 NTU Management Review Vol. 31 No. 3 Dec. 2021 organization, where frontline employees’ sensitivity to other people’s needs is important: if this sensitivity becomes blunted, employees may suffer both a decline in their ability to maintain service quality and a decline in their motivation to help other people, especially customers and colleagues (Avey et al., 2015; Rothbard and Wilk, 2011). Employees who feel that they do not deserve to receive supervisors’ negative treatment may consider some form of retaliation. However, because the power differentials between a supervisor and a subordinate favor the former over the latter, many employees avoid falling into the spiral of “tit for tat” (Lord, 1998). After all, an act of direct retaliation by an employee might trigger even greater hostility and abusiveness from the offending supervisor (Tepper et al., 2011; Zellars et al., 2002). To restore psychological balance and release negative feelings, some employees circuitously—and hence safely—reduce their service performance and their altruism toward colleagues (Aryee et al., 2008; Xu, Huang, Lam, and Miao, 2012). In sum, leaders’ NIFTs may be an antecedent of abusive supervision, and abusive supervision can result in employees’ negative mood, which can, in turn, impede service performance and altruistic behavior toward colleagues. We thus propose the following two hypotheses. Hypothesis 3a: Through the serial mediation of abusive supervision and employee negative mood, leaders’ NIFTs have a negative effect on employees’ service performance. Hypothesis 3b: Through the serial mediation of abusive supervision and employee negative mood, leaders’ NIFTs have a negative effect on employees’ altruistic behavior toward colleagues. 2.3 The Ef fects of Leaders’ NIFTs on Employees’ Work Outcomes: The Empowerment Process In the current study, we adopt the perspective of psychological empowerment to explain how leaders’ NIFTs affect employees’ service performance and altruistic behavior toward colleagues. Psychological empowerment is a set of work cognition, which can reflect employees’ intrinsic work motivation (Spreitzer, 1995; Thomas and Velthouse, 1990). Psychological empowerment comprises four cognitive elements: meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact (Spreitzer, 1995). Psychologically empowered employees feel that their work is meaningful, believe in their ability to perform the work, have a sense of choice in initiating and regulating activity, and presume that they can influence organizational strategies or operating procedures (Spreitzer, 1995,
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