TITLE:
Digitalization Capability, Business Process Reengineering, and Business Performance: Evidence from Six Middle Eastern Markets
AUTHORS:
Khaled Ahmed Mohamed Essa
KEYWORDS:
Digitalization Capability, Business Process Reengineering, Digital Leadership, Business Performance, PLS-SEM
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Access Library Journal,
Vol.13 No.10,
October
10,
2026
ABSTRACT: Enterprises across the Middle East have absorbed substantial digital investment, yet returns are uneven: firms with comparable digital technologies do not report comparable innovation, agility, or performance. Drawing on the Resource-Based View and Dynamic Capabilities perspective, this study tests Business Process Reengineering (BPR) as a mediator between digitalization capability (DC) and Organizational Agility (OA), Digital Innovation (DI), and Business Performance (BP), and whether digital leadership (DL) moderates the DC-BPR association. Because within-firm agreement on these constructs is negligible (Section 6.6), all constructs, hypotheses, and results below are defined and interpreted at the level at which they were measured: as employees’ individual perceptions of firm-level digital practices and outcomes, not as verified firm-level records. A structural model was estimated using genuine PLS-SEM (Mode A, PATH weighting) with percentile-bootstrap inference (2000 resamples for the base model; 1000 for the moderation and mediation sub-analyses) on 336 respondents nested within 50 firms across six Middle Eastern markets (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, Morocco, Qatar); firm-clustered standard errors correct inference for the base paths, and all percentile bootstraps—including the indirect and interaction effects—additionally use firm-block resampling for fully dependence-aware inference throughout (Section 6.6). DC was most strongly associated with BPR (β = 0.485), and all remaining hypothesized base paths (H1 - H7) were significant. For DC - DI, results show a complementary (partial) mediation pattern via BPR (H8: direct = 0.210, indirect = 0.120, confirmed by a dedicated single-estimand, firm-block bootstrap, 95% CI [0.073, 0.172], p β = 0.070, 95% CI [0.032, 0.114], p β = 0.044, p