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The purpose of this paper is to explore how leaders' emotional intelligence (EI) influences subordinates' trust and to examine the roles played in the process by abusive supervision (a negative leadership) and leader‐member exchange (LMX) (a positive leadership).

According to revelations in the case of Foxconn's jumping events and LMX theory, this paper argues that low levels of leaders' EI affect their subordinates' perception of abusive supervision and tends to cause their mistrust of employers in return, further damaging the employer‐employee relationship. Tension will develop or be intensified among such relationships as time evolves and relationship length extends. A superior‐subordinate matching questionnaire survey was conducted among enterprises in Shenzhen, China. About 202 valid samples were eventually collected. The data were analyzed through correlation analysis, regression analysis, CFA, EFA and SEM using SPSS and LISREL.

The EI of superiors has a significant positive impact on the personal trust between subordinates and superiors, in which both abusive supervision and LMX play a partial mediating role; and the relationship length of superiors and subordinates plays a moderating role between LMX and affective trust.

The paper advises that when selecting leaders, more emphasis should be placed on EI, and managers should be trained to improve their emotional skills.

The paper extends the research on the antecedent and consequence variables of abusive supervision in Chinese enterprises, discussing both positive and negative leadership.

Synthesizing theories of prosocial motivation and action identification, the purpose of this paper is to test several hypotheses associating abusive supervisory behavior with employees’ work behaviors via intervening variables, i.e., intrinsic motivation and family motivation.

The two-study examination of outcomes of abusive supervision stands in contrast to prior research, which has primarily focused on family motivation that influences supervisor-subordinate relationship. A lagged survey study at a Fortune 500 company and an experience sampling study at multi-organizations located in Anhui province of People’s Republic of China (PRC) support the moderated-mediation motivational model.

In the first study, designed as a lagged survey study, the authors found that abusive supervision is negatively associated with employees’ job performance and positively associated with employees’ turnover intentions. As anticipated, the results also found that family motivation moderates the direct relationship between abusive supervision and employees’ work behaviors. Furthermore, these results were then replicated and expanded in an experience sampling study. Consistent with the predictions, the authors found that intrinsic motivation acts as a mediator between abusive supervision and employees’ work behaviors and family motivation has the capacity to compensate for the absence of intrinsic motivation.

Although the paper contributes to leadership and motivation literature, there are several noteworthy limitations to be discussed in the future. The subjective measurement, the validity of abusive supervision in the Chinese context and generalizing of the study in western countries are the key limitations of the study. Moreover, the authors measure abusive supervision only on high/low frequency based rather than high/low intensity. Hence, there is a possibility that intensity and frequency have dissimilar effects.

The study with meaningful implications on motivation and leadership research concludes that family as a powerful source of motivation encourages subordinates’ job performance and discourages employees’ turnover intentions at the workplace, even under abusive supervision.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the link between perceived subordinate performance and abusive supervision. From the perspective of moral exclusion theory, the authors examine cooperative goal interdependence and competitive goal interdependence as key boundary conditions to hypothesize and demonstrate the direct negative relationship between low-performing subordinates and abusive supervision. Within the moral exclusion framework, supervisors may strategically abuse low performers when cooperative goal interdependence is high, or competitive goal interdependence is low. Moreover, this study explores the impact of abusive supervision on subordinate’s objective performance.

This research employs two independent studies to examine the antecedents and consequences of abusive supervision based on respondents from a Fortune 500 company located in Anhui province of People’s Republic of China (PRC). Study 1 uses a time lagged, single source survey while Study 2 employs multi-source, multi-wave data. The results support the integrated model.

Across the two studies, the results showed that the direct negative relationship between perceived subordinate performance and abusive supervision was found to be stronger when cooperative goal interdependence was high and when competitive goal interdependence was low. Study 2 also revealed the negative impact of abusive supervision on subordinate’s objective performance and that the conditional indirect effect of subordinate’s perceived performance on objective performance via abusive supervision was contingent on the extent of cooperative and competitive goal interdependence.

The results clearly demonstrate that supervisors are likely to turn to abusive supervision in response to poor performing subordinates but that the tendency to use abuse as an instrumental strategy for improving subordinate performance is dependent on the nature of goal interdependence between the supervisor and subordinates’ goals. The research also shows that although supervisors may turn to abusive supervision under certain goal interdependence conditions, it is not an effective strategy for actually improving subordinate objective performance. In fact, it has the opposite effect.