49 NTU Management Review Vol. 31 No. 3 Dec. 2021 employee job performance (e.g., Whiteley et al., 2012), creativity (Kong, Xu, Zhou, and Yuan, 2019), and career success (Gao and Wu, 2019). However, research has yet to examine the consequences of NIFTs. Furthermore, Sy (2010) tests only the correlations between NIFTs and several criterion variables (comprising liking, LMX, trust, and job satisfaction) and thus did not examine the effects of NIFTs on employee performance and behaviors. As PIFTs and NIFTs are not theoretically identical but unique in nature, we believe the psychological processes and actual outcomes of NIFTs are worth examining and developing. Besides, leaders do not always hold positive assumptions about employees. Indeed, leaders’ negative assumptions about employees are not rare, and may be even more common and may have an even more serious impact on employees than positive assumptions (Eden, 1990; Oz and Eden, 1994). Until now, the IFT research field has examined only a very limited number of outcome variables in empirical studies. Prior studies have identified various effects of IFTs on employees’ performance, behavior, and well-being (e.g., Gao and Wu, 2019; Helfrich and Dietl, 2019; Whiteley et al., 2012), but whether or not leaders’ IFTs have effects beyond the leader-subordinate dyads is still unknown. In a service organization, the interactions that frontline employees have with customers and colleagues may be shaped by how the employees perceive their leaders’ IFTs as well as how the employees experience their leaders’ treatment. Recent leadership literature has called for researchers to pay closer attention to the trickle-down effect or spillover effect of leadership on a variety of parties (e.g., Chen, Chen, Zhong, Son, Zhang, and Liu, 2015; Chen, Smith, Kirkman, Zhang, Lemoine, and Farh, 2019; Chi, Chen, Huang, and Chen, 2018; Masterson, 2001).1 We have responded to this call in the present study by treating frontline service employees as main participants and by then examining how leaders’ NIFTs and the associated manifestation of leadership behaviors influence employees themselves and the parties with whom the employees often interact (i.e., customers and colleagues). Work behaviors can be affect-driven or cognition-driven (Reynolds, Zhu, Aquino, and Strejcek, 2021; Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996). Affect-driven behaviors are relatively 1 The trickle-down effect helps describe the vertical influence that emanates from a higher organizational level to a lower organizational level. This effect can be found in supervisor-subordinate interactions (e.g., Tepper and Taylor, 2003) and employee-customer interactions (Masterson, 2001). The spillover effect helps describe the horizontal influences that occur across employees or across teams in an organization (Chen et al., 2015; Chen et al., 2019).
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