57 NTU Management Review Vol. 31 No. 3 Dec. 2021 empowerment in a variety of ways. First, many subordinates in a good LMX relationship understand the work goals delivered by their leaders and thus strongly grasp meaning pertinent to a workplace context (Aryee and Chen, 2006). Second, as the leader provides support and challenging opportunities to subordinates, they can experience a growing sense of competence (Kim, Liu, and Diefendorff, 2015). Third, mutual trust between subordinates and their leaders can translate into broad job definitions and considerable task-performance leeway for the subordinates (Hsiung and Tsai, 2009), ultimately giving them a strong sense of self-determination. Fourth, a leader who regards subordinates as in-group members is likely to ask that they shoulder substantial responsibilities, with the result that the in-group subordinates regard themselves as beneficial to their organizations (Kim et al., 2015). In sum, high-quality LMX can widely enhance subordinates’ sense of their own psychological empowerment in the workplace. However, if a leader holds NIFTs toward a specific subordinate, this subordinate may not have a chance to develop a good LMX relationship with the leader. Losing the accompanied social support, career benefits, and work advantages, this subordinate is less likely to experience high-level psychological empowerment. Therefore, we propose the following mediating hypothesis. Hypothesis 5: Through the mediation of LMX, leaders’ NIFTs are negatively related to employees’ perception of psychological empowerment. A number of studies have found that psychological empowerment is positively related to employee altruism and task performance (e.g., Seibert et al., 2011; Turnipseed and VandeWaa, 2020). Empowered employees take an active attitude toward their work. They believe that their work is meaningful and their skill set is satisfactory, so they are willing to perform beyond their job description’s requirements (Seibert et al., 2011; Spreitzer, 2008). In a service organization, frontline employees’ psychological empowerment determines how they deliver service. For example, customers often have diverse needs and preferences, which an empowered employee would feel free to address openly and flexibly (Kirkman and Rosen, 1999; Liao, Toya, Lepak, and Hong, 2009). Nevertheless, when leaders hold negative followership assumptions toward frontline service employees, leaders and employees cannot build a trustful and supportive relationship. In such a situation, employees lack the necessary autonomy and confidence to adjust to workplace duties and may prefer to follow rigid long-standing rules rather than adopt a creative, humanistic way to address customer complaints and other types of on-site service
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