76 The Influences of Leaders’ Negative Implicit Followership Theories on Employees’Work Behaviors: A DualPathway Model collectivism (Hofstede et al., 2010). In such a society, employee conformity may even be regarded as a virtue or an obligation (Bond and Smith, 1996). We echo Epitropaki et al. (2013) perspective that the content of leaders’ NIFTs may vary significantly according to cultural differences. Some prototypes and antiprototypes may be universal whereas others may be culturally specific. Previous literature indicates that abusive supervision occurs more frequently in East Asian countries than in the United States (Mackey et al., 2017; Tepper et al., 2017). We conjecture that the differences between leaders’ IFTs in East Asian countries and those in non-East Asian (particularly in Western) countries may be one of the important reasons. Given that the current study’s conceptual domain of IFTs is not identical to the one developed by Sy (2010), we remind readers to scrutinize the content of IFTs when interpreting our findings. We also encourage future research to replicate or extend our theoretical framework by using samples from other countries, and to examine the commonalities and distinctions of IFTs across different cultural contexts. 6. Conclusion This study uses service employees as its research sample to investigate how leaders’ NIFTs influence employees’ behaviors and performance. The findings of this study reveal that leaders’ NIFTs affect employees’ service performance and altruistic behavior toward colleagues through two distinct psychological processes: an emotional process and an empowerment/work-cognition process. In the emotional process, leaders’ NIFTs increase abusive supervision, which elicits in employees a negative mood and then reduces their service performance without reducing their altruistic behavior toward colleagues. In the empowerment/work-cognition process, leaders’ NIFTs undermine LMX quality, which further affects employees’ perception of psychological empowerment and then lowers employees’ service performance and altruistic behavior toward colleagues. On the basis of our findings, we suggest that service organization leaders be aware of how their intrinsic assumptions influence subordinates in multiple regards and how these assumptions trickle down or spill over to other organizational stakeholders. As the empirical studies on leaders’ implicit assumptions are still quite limited, we encourage future research to expand the nomological network of leaders’ IFTs and to discuss the content of these IFTs under different cultural contexts.
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