Organizational transformation is often explained through favorable leadership, supportive culture, employee participation, workforce well-being, or stakeholder engagement, yet these literatures frequently treat their focal mechanism as if it were independently sufficient. This critical review examines how these five domains contribute to sustained organizational transformation while testing the assumptions that connect nominal practices to enacted mechanisms and short-term responses to durable organizational change. A structured critical-review approach was used to compare construct definitions, evidence types, levels of analysis, temporal designs, contradictions, and contextual boundaries across an eligible management and organization literature published from 2017 to 2026. The verified curated screening ledger contained 55 candidate articles, of which 39 were retained after claim-fit and eligibility screening; raw database-identification and duplicate-removal counts were not reproducibly available and were not inferred. The reviewed evidence indicates that transformation is better understood as a conditional and temporal organizational accomplishment than as the additive result of favorable practices. Leadership effects depend on how influence is enacted and received; culture operates alongside strategic and structural capabilities; participation can occur without consequential inclusion; implementation responses can diverge from employee well-being; and formal stakeholder arrangements may not produce substantive engagement. The review therefore develops a proposed integrative logic in which sustained transformation depends on compatibility among mechanisms operating across individual, organizational, and stakeholder levels. This synthesis is not a validated causal model. Its principal limitations arise from heterogeneous constructs, designs, contexts, time horizons, and uneven cross-level evidence.
