Digital transformation has become a central organizational concern, yet the literature remains divided over what is transformed, which organizational actors carry the process, and how leadership, governance, culture, capabilities, and workforce adaptation relate across levels and over time. This scoping review maps peer-reviewed Q1 journal evidence published from 2017 through 2025 to clarify those relationships without treating heterogeneous studies as evidence of a single causal pathway. The review distinguishes digital transformation from narrower digitization or technology adoption, charts evidence across five organizational domains, and examines where studies connect or isolate them. The synthesis indicates that transformation is most consistently described as organizational reconfiguration rather than technological substitution alone. Leadership evidence emphasizes context-sensitive competencies, meaning-making, communication, and strategic direction; governance studies emphasize strategic alignment, information quality, board and top-management interfaces, and structural choices; culture research treats norms and learning conditions as changeable but not sufficient; capability studies emphasize renewal, agility, and ecosystem dependence; and workforce research separates literacy, adaptation, resistance, well-being, and talent mechanisms. On this basis, the review proposes an integrative digital-transformation change framework in which the five domains are analytically distinct but mutually conditioning, with temporal, contextual, and level-of-analysis boundaries explicitly retained. The review informs future multilevel and longitudinal research and cautions managers against universal transformation recipes. Its conclusions are bounded by heterogeneous designs, sectoral variation, uneven cross-domain integration, and the non-causal purpose of scoping synthesis.
