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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.