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Introduction
Faced with an increasingly complex environment, organizations are required to continually change to ensure their existence and their long-term success (By, 2005). Yet, many organizational change initiatives fail to deliver the expected results (Beer and Nohria, 2000). Researchers have increasingly concluded that change leaders often underestimate the major role of employees' responses to change for change success (Choi, 2011). Readiness for change (RFC) captures employees' reactions to change as it refers to employees' beliefs, attitudes and intentions regarding the extent to which changes are needed and the organization is capable to implement those changes successfully (Armenakis et al., 1993). RFC is considered as a central change attitudinal variable (Choi, 2011). It is considered as the precursor of resistance to change (Armenakis et al., 1993) and, as such, as a precondition for successful changes implementations (Bagrationi and Thurner, 2020). Empirical evidence has demonstrated that RFC is a key predictor of resistance to change (McKay et al., 2013), and conversely, of change support (Rafferty and Minbashian, 2018). Given its crucial role in facilitating change success, scholars have investigated its antecedents, mostly stemming from the organization. Notably, empirical research has proven that perceptions of justice treatments provided by the organization foster RFC (Shah, 2011; Arnéguy et al., 2018).
In contrast, less is known about the possible influence of other sources such as the supervisor or colleagues on RFC. Since employees interact with multiple entities in the workplace, it is crucial to advance our understanding of their specific effects. This is all the more important as research has consistently shown that employees differentiate treatments received from various sources, including (un)just treatments (Ohana, 2016; Lavelle et al., 2009). Furthermore, research has demonstrated that justice treatments have differential effects according to their source. For example, Khazanchi and Masterson (2011) have simultaneously explored the impact of organizational and supervisory justices on two important creativity indicators for organizational change and innovation, i.e. employee idea promotion and generation. Results indicated that organizational justice was related to idea promotion, while supervisory justice was not. On the contrary, supervisory justice was related to idea generation, while organizational justice was not. In addition, to our knowledge, no studies have ever examined the effect of supervisory and colleagues justices on RFC. In...