Nowadays, with the increasingly high pressure in workplace, employees’ mental health has grown to become a serious issue in modern society. When studying the cause of employee mental health problem, we find that abusive supervisor, as a type of negative management styles, would often create a negative impact on his/her employees’ mental health. But how exactly does abusive supervision affect mental health? What’s the mechanism? There are no such empirical studies yet. In the meantime, the research finds that negative affect, as a mediating mechanism between abusive supervisors and their subordinates’ attitudes and behaviors, is getting more attention. Therefore, based on Affective Events Theory, this thesis studies the mediating role of employee work affect between abusive supervisor behaviors and employees’ mental health.The research was conducted on full-time employees in two times, which adopted convenience questionnaire survey firstly and the two-stage questionnaire survey method. In the second survey, there is a one-month interval before the second stage begins. By adopting SPSS, AMOS and other softwares, the results from the structural equation model showed that: (1) abusive supervision has a significantly negative correlation with high-activation and low-activation pleasant affects, and a significantly positive correlation with high-activation and low-activation unpleasant affects. (2) Low-activation unpleasant affect is significantly negative correlated with mental health and it also mediates the relationship between abusive supervisor behaviors and employees’ mental health. Abusive supervision negatively impacts the mental health of subordinates by firstly influencing their work affect.The thesis has thereby verified and confirmed that the mediating role work affect plays between abusive management and mental health for the first time, and found that only low-activation negative affect plays a mediating role between abusive management and mental health and highlighted its importance in mental health. Meanwhile, this study extends to the field of mental health based on the relationship between affect and mental health. On one hand, it provides an affective perspective for exploring the influence of abusive supervision on the mental health of subordinates while on the other hand, it also extends and supplements Affective Events Theory from the perspective of affective results. (Affective Events Theory itself mainly focuses on the influence of emotion on attitudes and behaviors, while previous studies about abusive management also focused on the attitudes and behaviors，rather than the psychological impact). Moreover, the research paid special attention to the inhibitory effect of abusive supervision on positive affects, which was rarely seen among studies on negative leadership styles, and have therefore provided a new perspective on the influence of relevant management styles on work affect, while further improves the theories.
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