72 The Influences of Leaders’ Negative Implicit Followership Theories on Employees’Work Behaviors: A DualPathway Model influence frontline service employees’ performance and behaviors through two different psychological processes: one related to emotions, and the other to empowerment or work cognitions. We respectively use affective events theory and psychological empowerment theory to explain these two processes. For the emotional process, we find that leaders’ NIFTs are associated with employees’ perception of abusive supervision, which in turn results in employees’ negative mood, and finally leads to poor service performance. For the work cognition or empowerment process, we find that leaders’ NIFTs have negative influences on LMX quality, which in turn reduces employees’ perception of psychological empowerment, and finally results in poor service performance and low performance of altruistic behavior toward colleagues. Taken together, our findings support the assertion that both emotional and empowerment processes operate in workplaces. 5.1 Theoretical Contributions The findings of this study yield several implications for theory and practice. First, our study contributes to the literature on leaders’ assumptions by examining the effects of leaders’ NIFTs on employees’ work behaviors through an emotional path and an empowerment path. Although several decades ago management scholars propose the idea that the management styles adopted by leaders reflect their assumptions about followers (e.g., McGregor, 1960), very few researchers have tried to conceptualize the content of leaders’ follower-assumptions and develop adequate scales for the empirical measurement of these assumptions. The factor model of IFTs proposed by Sy (2010) appears to be one of the most sophisticated theoretical frameworks in this research domain, and the same study also develops an impressive measurement scale for gauging leaders’ positive and negative IFTs. Several prior studies have examined the consequences of PIFTs (e.g., Gao and Wu, 2019; Whiteley et al., 2012). Our study, by contrast, has investigated chiefly the topic of leaders’ NIFTs. We find that leaders’ NIFTs can indirectly influence employees’ performance and behaviors through two different psychological paths (i.e., an emotional path and an empowerment path). As prior studies do not focus on the consequences of leaders’ NIFTs, our findings can bring supplementary knowledge to the nomological network of the IFT framework. Furthermore, leaders’ subscription to negative assumptions about employees may be a far more prevalent phenomenon (Eden, 1990; Oz and Eden, 1994) than leaders’ subscription to positive assumptions. Our study undoubtedly taps into and responds to an important need in this research area.
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