Ambidexterity and Organisational Health in Public Sector Digital Transformation: A Scoping Review

Public organisations must run existing services reliably while reinventing how they are delivered, a tension that digital transformation has intensified rather than resolved. Ambidexterity names the capacity to hold both demands, and its normative appeal rests on the premise that balancing exploration and exploitation sustains the organisation. Whether that premise has been tested is unclear: the two literatures have developed separately. Following established guidance for scoping reviews and its reporting extension, we searched one citation database, screened 461 records against criteria set in advance by three reviewers, and assessed 33 full texts, of which 22 were eligible. The evidence is recent, geographically concentrated, and cross-sectional. Seventeen mutually exclusive labels for ambidexterity appear; only two report a replicable instrument source, and none is used twice. Eleven studies name an organisational-health construct but only four measure one separately from ambidexterity. Where imbalance is documented, the included studies attribute it to governance rather than to managerial preference. The novelty of this review lies in an eligibility rule that breaks the circularity arising when ambidexterity is itself defined through adaptability; applying it reduces the apparent evidence from eleven studies to four and shows the founding premise of the field to be untested.