and motivating environment to help employees fully unfold their potential (e.g., Pfeffer, 1994;Shalley et al., 2000). However, employees do not respond to the work environment mechanically, and their perception and interpretation of the environment are crucial in shaping their attitudinal and behavioural responses (James et al., 1978). For instance, a work environment designed to be motivating may not show the intended effects because employees do not perceive the environment as motivating (e.g., Deci et al., 1999). To address this issue, there has been considerable research in the past several decades on the role and dynamics of psychological climate -defined as 'the meanings that people impute to their jobs, co-workers, leaders, pay, performance expectations, opportunities for promotion, equity of treatment, and the like ' (James et al., 2008: 6). Psychological climate also has important practical implications, as it is related to a variety of major work outcomes, such as organisational commitment, job satisfaction, and performance (Carr et al., 2003;Parker et al., 2003). It is important to note that we are concerned with processes at the individual level, and research on organisational climate (Schneider et al., 2011), which conceptualizes climate as a property of an organisation, is not our focus.Despite the well-documented importance of psychological climate, our knowledge of its antecedents is surprisingly limited. This gap is problematic because a theory of psychological climate is incomplete without a clear understanding of the factors that shape its formation. Indeed, Parker et al. (2003: 408) recommended that 'clarifying the origins of psychological climate perceptions would help to clarify the specific mechanisms by which perceptions of the work environment influence individual outcomes.' The limited research on the antecedents of psychological climate has primarily focused on situational factors, such as 3 supportive supervisor, rewarding co-worker relationships, and high-performance human resource practices (e.g., May et al., 2004;Wei et al., 2010), which are conceptualized as cues for drawing inferences about the nature of a workplace. This line of work, while important, does not consider the possibility that people exhibit some degree of across-situation consistency in the perception of psychological climate because they tend to confirm what they are prepared to see (Snyder and Ickes, 1985). For example, some employees complain vehemently about their work environment even if many other employees perceive the same environment as attractive (Grensing-Pophal, 2001). Situational factors are not the only antecedents of psychological climate, as Brown and Leigh (1996: 359) suggested that 'psychological climate is likely to result from individual differences among employees, from differences in situations (i.e. features of organizational environments), as well as from the interaction between the person and situation.' The lack of research on dispositional antecedents of psychological climate limits the...