Strategic Resilience in the Face of Digital Disruption: A Case Study of Banking Institutions رسالة دكتوراة

Abstract

Digital disruption is reframing competitive logics in banking, yet little is known about how institutions in resource-constrained, volatility-prone environments build the strategic resilience needed to thrive. This study investigates the interplay between digital banking technologies, digital leadership, organizational culture, team resilience and performance in the Palestinian banking sector. Guided by a positivist, deductive philosophy, a cross-sectional survey was administered to 219 managers and team members across domestic and foreign-owned banks; convenience sampling was adopted to overcome logistical and security barriers in the territory. Measurement items were adapted from prior studies and refined through expert review and pilot testing, then analysed with Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modelling (PLS SEM). Results reveal that digital banking platforms directly enhance team resilience (β=0.198, p<0.05), yet their effectiveness is contingent upon organizational context. Digital leadership style amplifies this relationship through positive moderation (β=0.174, p<0.01), demonstrating that technology impact intensifies when leaders champion digital transformation. Conversely, organizational culture exhibits negative moderation (β=-0.164, p<0.01), suggesting that very strong existing cultures may reduce the marginal gains from new digital technologies, pointing to potential saturation effects. Resilient teams subsequently exhibit substantially superior performance outcomes (β=0.615, p<0.001), confirming team resilience as a critical mediating capability. Collectively, the model explains substantial variance in both resilience (R²=0.563) and performance (R²=0.378), It had to demonstrate internal consistency and convergent validity, and show that multicollinearity was not a problem. Discriminant validity was checked using Fornell-Larcker, cross-loadings, and HTMT. HTMT inference, using bootstrapped confidence intervals, was used to assess the high HTMT criterion. The dissertation contributes an integrated socio-technical framework extending dynamic capability theory to an emerging-market context, demonstrating that while digital banking investments directly build resilience, their magnitude depends critically on leadership vision and cultural alignment. Technology alone provides foundational capability, but becomes a resilience amplifier only when intertwined with digitally capable leadership and thoughtfully managed organizational culture. Practically, the findings furnish bankers and regulators with evidence-based guidance: orchestrating digital investments requires simultaneous attention to leadership development and cultural evolution to convert disruption into sustained competitive advantage. Beyond confirming these statistical relationships, the study argues that these patterns emerge because digital tools change how Palestinian bank teams sense, interpret, and respond to disruption, and because leadership and culture either unlock or constrain this adaptive potential. Explicitly linking the numerical results to underlying socio-technical mechanisms, the dissertation highlights why some banks are more resilient than others under digital disruption, rather than only whether the relationships are significant