75 NTU Management Review Vol. 31 No. 3 Dec. 2021 regulation and relates to emotional exhaustion (Pham, 2007; Zhan, Wang, and Shi, 2016). Employees with a negative affective state may express their feelings directly or just adopt surface acting when facing customers. However, reducing employees’ negative mood cannot guarantee that customers receive high-quality and customized service. Frontline employees’ psychological empowerment is a key to improving their workplace confidence, which enables them to polish their service-related tasks and provide colleagues assistance on site. Insofar as leaders’ NIFTs may exert significant influences on employees’ service performance and altruistic behaviors toward colleagues, we suggest that leaders should be cautious about how they consciously or unconsciously form their IFTs and how these IFTs affect employees as well as the persons with whom employees interact. 5.3 Limitations and Future Research A key strength of this study is our collecting data from three sources (that is, the store managers, the focal service employees, and the colleagues), thus reducing the concern about common method variance. However, the current study has limitations that merit our attention here and that can serve to instruct future research. First, we adopt a crosssectional design rather than a longitudinal design. Although our theoretical model appears to be superior to several competing models in which the causal sequences of variables are re-specified (see Table 5), we cannot completely exclude the possibility of reverse causality. We suggest that future researchers collect data at different time points to better address the causality among variables mentioned in the current study. Second, we collect “service performance” data and “altruistic behavior toward colleagues” data from the colleagues of our study’s main participants in their work settings. These colleagues are, from our perspective, the individuals best able to rate the main participants’ altruistic behaviors, but customers, instead of colleagues, could also have provided reliable service-performance ratings of the main participants. For future studies, researchers could collect service-related outcome variables from customers to further examine the trickle-down effect proposed in the current study. Third, Sy (2010) theoretical framework of leaders’ IFTs uses three antiprototypes to describe leaders’ negative IFTs: conformity, insubordination, and incompetence. However, our study does not contain the antiprototype of “conformity,” because it may not be a negative attribute for a subordinate in an East Asian culture. Our data are collected in Taiwan, where East Asian culture places a significant premium on high power distance and
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