Leadership mediated governance capability and procurement documentation integrity reform

Purpose:
This review examines whether rule based and technology enabled documentation controls are sufficient for public procurement integrity and identifies the governance capabilities that condition their effectiveness.

Design/methodology/approach:
Following Okoli’s 2015, eight stage guide and reporting against PRISMA 2020, EBSCO, ProQuest and Google Scholar were searched for English language, peer reviewed journal articles published between 1 January 2015 and 4 March 2026. Screening produced a 132 record analytic register, from which 48 studies were retrieved as archived full texts and appraised using design appropriate criteria informed by the Cochrane Handbook. Findings were organised into five conceptual themes and cross checked against seven evidence derived synthesis findings.

Findings:
Across the 48 studies, documentation rules, audit trails, e-procurement and open contracting platforms improved traceability and access, but their effects consistently depended on enforcement, capacity, leadership, ethical culture and meaningful stakeholder access rather than on adoption alone. No study demonstrated that formal or digital controls independently reduced corruption. The evidence supports complementarity between technical controls and governance capability, not the replacement of rules by leadership. The review formalises leadership mediated governance capability as a construct with three properties, develops a four layer documentation integrity framework, and advances four propositions specifying the conditions under which controls convert into substantive integrity.

Research limitations/implications:
The English language and peer reviewed only criteria may have excluded relevant national language and institutional evidence, and the appraisal was not independently duplicated.

Originality:
The review reframes documentation integrity as an organisational and interorganisational governance capability rather than an administrative compliance task, grounded in a quality appraised full text corpus and expressed in a testable propositional form.