The research team, led by Manal Ali Almarashdah of Jadara University together with Ayman Abdalmajeed Alsmadi of Al Zaytoonah University of Jordan and Mohammad Ali Al-Afeef of Al Al-Bayt University, grounded their work in two complementary theoretical traditions: the resource-based view and dynamic capability theory. The resource-based view holds that valuable, rare and hard-to-imitate resources — such as an agile strategy process or a digitally committed leadership team — form the raw material of competitive advantage. Dynamic capability theory explains how firms sense opportunities, seize them and continuously reconfigure resources in fast-moving environments. In the study’s framework, strategic agility, digital orientation and innovation governance act as strategic resources, while FinTech capability maturity serves as the dynamic capability that converts those resources into measurable outcomes.

FinTech capability maturity is defined as an organization’s accumulated ability to systematically integrate, implement and continuously improve its use of financial technology — a progression that runs from basic digital adoption through data-driven innovation to fully integrated financial ecosystems. The authors argue that this construct fills a gap in the literature, which has often examined FinTech from the standpoint of customer adoption or technological implementation without identifying the organizational capability through which managerial decisions translate into performance. By positioning maturity as the central mediating capability, the study offers a unified explanation of how leadership actions produce long-term value in turbulent digital financial markets.

To test their model, the researchers surveyed 255 qualified informants working in Jordanian banks, financial institutions and FinTech organizations. Respondents included senior managers, digital transformation specialists, innovation managers, IT professionals, compliance officers and risk managers — all selected through purposive sampling to ensure direct knowledge of their organizations’ digital strategies and FinTech initiatives. The questionnaire contained 24 items across six constructs, adapted from previously validated measurement scales and reviewed by three academic experts before distribution. The sample size exceeded established requirements for partial least squares structural equation modeling, and the researchers assessed non-response bias and common method bias, finding no statistically significant differences between early and late respondents and full collinearity variance inflation factors below the recommended threshold of 3.3.

The analysis, conducted in SmartPLS 4, proceeded in two stages. The measurement models showed strong psychometric quality: all factor loadings exceeded 0.60, Cronbach’s alpha and composite reliability values surpassed the 0.70 benchmark, average variance extracted exceeded 0.50, and discriminant validity was confirmed using both the Fornell-Larcker criterion and the heterotrait-monotrait ratio. The structural model was then evaluated with bootstrapping based on 5,000 subsamples, testing five hypothesized direct relationships between the constructs.

The results were strikingly consistent. Strategic agility exerted the strongest influence on FinTech capability maturity, with a path coefficient of 0.406, followed by managerial digital orientation at 0.344 and innovation governance at 0.207, all statistically significant. Together, the three predictors explained 63.6 percent of the variance in FinTech capability maturity — a substantial share for organizational research. In turn, maturity showed powerful downstream effects: it explained 34.8 percent of the variance in service innovation performance, with a path coefficient of 0.590, and 46.0 percent of the variance in organizational responsiveness, with a coefficient of 0.678. Model fit statistics, including a standardized root mean square residual of 0.073, fell within acceptable limits, and all inner variance inflation values remained well below collinearity thresholds.

Each capability contributes through a distinct mechanism, the authors explain. Strategic agility enables firms to perceive technological shifts early and rapidly reallocate resources toward emerging FinTech opportunities, accelerating the adoption of artificial intelligence, blockchain and big data analytics. Managerial digital orientation shapes where money and attention flow: digitally oriented leaders champion experimentation, prioritize technology investments and cultivate cultures of continuous digital learning, which smooth the integration of FinTech solutions into existing operations. Innovation governance — the formal structures, policies and oversight committees that direct innovation activity — aligns technology investments with strategy, manages the risks of emerging technologies and helps organizations navigate the stringent regulatory demands of financial services, a factor the authors consider especially important in highly regulated markets like Jordan.

The downstream consequences are equally consequential for practice. Financial institutions with high FinTech capability maturity can fuse AI, blockchain and analytics with their service processes, producing personalized offerings, faster delivery and richer customer experiences — the hallmarks of superior service innovation performance. Maturity also underpins responsiveness: real-time data, advanced analytics and integrated digital systems allow firms to detect market shifts, react to regulatory changes, launch products quickly and coordinate responses across departments. The study situates these findings in Jordan’s rapidly digitalizing financial sector, where the Central Bank of Jordan has encouraged digital banking, mobile payments and regulatory technology, and where banks face simultaneous pressures from cybersecurity requirements, financial inclusion programs and FinTech entrants.

The authors draw pointed implications for policymakers and executives. Regulators should create innovation-friendly frameworks, including regulatory sandboxes, that let institutions experiment with AI, blockchain and open banking while safeguarding stability. Central banks are urged to embed digital leadership training and national FinTech awareness programs in digital transformation strategies. Financial institutions themselves are advised to benchmark their FinTech maturity regularly, tie digital objectives to executive performance evaluations, establish cross-functional innovation committees spanning business, technology, risk and compliance, and invest in scalable platforms and data-driven decision systems. Collaboration among banks, FinTech firms, universities and technology providers, the study adds, can accelerate knowledge diffusion and raise digital competence across the entire sector.

The researchers acknowledge limitations that temper interpretation. The cross-sectional design cannot establish causality over time, the Jordanian context may limit generalizability to other economies, and self-reported survey data carries residual bias risks despite procedural and statistical safeguards. The study tested only direct relationships and three predictors, leaving room for future work on mediators such as organizational learning and AI adoption, moderators like environmental uncertainty, and longitudinal designs tracking capability development. Even so, the core message stands out with unusual clarity: in emerging digital financial markets, sustained advantage flows not from technology purchases but from the managerial capabilities — agility, digital leadership and disciplined governance — that turn FinTech potential into organizational performance.

Subject of Research: How managerial capabilities drive FinTech capability maturity and organizational performance in financial institutions

Article Title: Strategic agility and digital orientation as drivers of FinTech capability and organizational performance

Article References: Strategic agility and digital orientation as drivers of FinTech capability and organizational performance. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00581-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00581-6

Keywords: FinTech, strategic agility, digital orientation, innovation governance, dynamic capability theory, resource-based view, digital transformation, service innovation, organizational responsiveness, Jordan, banking, PLS-SEM

The research, published in the journal Discover Sustainability, was conducted by Harimukti Wandebori, Anak Agung Ngurah Tata Pinandhika, and Bernadetta Nadya Amarani Sitompul of the School of Business and Management at Bandung Institute of Technology. Their starting point was a long-standing unresolved question in the sustainability literature: do the very capabilities that keep small firms viable in volatile markets also move them toward greener practices? Most previous studies could not answer this because they collapsed economic, social, and environmental performance into a single composite score, obscuring exactly the differences that matter most for policy and practice.

The team focused on strategic agility, a dynamic capability that combines two distinct components: market responsiveness, meaning the speed with which a firm detects and reacts to changes in customer needs, competitor moves, and emerging threats; and resource fluidity, meaning the ease with which money, people, and equipment can be redeployed across activities. They also modelled three separate channels through which agility might indirectly influence sustainability: managerial ties with buyers, ties with suppliers, and ties with government officials. Crucially, each channel was specified separately, and each of the three sustainability pillars was treated as a distinct outcome rather than blended into an index.

The survey gathered responses from 179 strategic decision makers in Indonesian micro and small enterprises. The measurement design showed unusual care for a survey study of this kind. Predictor and outcome blocks used deliberately differentiated response anchors so that, for example, economic performance was rated relative to competitors while environmental practices were rated on frequency of use. Two attention check items with prescribed answers were embedded at separate points, completion times were recorded automatically, and a marker variable built from questions about attitudes toward the colour blue allowed the researchers to test statistically whether common method bias was inflating their estimates. Analysis proceeded with partial least squares structural equation modelling, a technique suited to complex path models with modest samples.

The headline result was a clear asymmetry. Strategic agility predicted economic performance with a path coefficient of 0.409 and social performance with 0.365, both medium effect sizes, but environmental performance at only 0.218, roughly half the strength of the other two. Because the outcome scales used different anchors, the team checked the gap on scale-free metrics. On latent correlations, the environmental pillar separated from the economic pillar by 0.229 and from the social pillar by 0.196, with bootstrap intervals that excluded zero in both cases. On the metric of partial coefficients, only the separation from the economic pillar was statistically distinguishable, and the authors are explicit that their title claims only that contrast. The gap also passed a battery of robustness checks: the environmental block showed the lowest ceiling rate and the most symmetric response distribution of the three, which is the opposite of what a ceiling effect or social desirability bias would produce, and correcting for unequal reliability across blocks widened rather than narrowed the difference.

Perhaps the most sobering finding concerned prediction. The model achieved out-of-sample predictive relevance for the economic and social pillars, meaning the estimated structure genuinely anticipated new observations, but it achieved none for the environmental pillar. In other words, the capability-and-ties framework that works for explaining how small firms prosper and serve their communities simply does not contain enough signal to forecast their environmental behaviour. The indirect effect of agility on environmental performance through managerial ties was statistically equivalent to zero against a triviality bound of 0.10, tested with two one-sided tests on the bootstrap distribution.

The tie-based channels themselves fared almost entirely empty. Of the nine paths running from the three tie types to the three pillars, only one, buyer ties to social performance, reached significance at a coefficient of 0.193. The authors handle this carefully: one significant result out of nine tests is a count compatible with chance, and it does not survive correction for multiplicity. They report it as a pattern to be tested in future work rather than as an established mechanism, a level of statistical honesty that stands out in a literature where such a result might otherwise be presented as a discovery.

The study also probes what the gap means mechanistically, and here an item-level analysis delivers a subtle twist. One plausible explanation for weak environmental performance would be simple economics: environmental practices cost money without returning it, so agile firms invest where returns register. If pricing were the boundary, the one environmental practice that pays for itself, reducing waste and resource inefficiency, should attract agility’s influence more strongly than the two that do not. The item-level estimates ordered the three environmental items exactly as that reward-boundary argument predicts, but no within-block difference was statistically distinguishable. Pricing alone, therefore, is not the whole story; the boundary appears to lie in whether a firm’s existing routines register any return at all, and environmental returns rarely do for a small enterprise.

There is an important design caveat the authors state plainly: because a cross-sectional sample contains only surviving firms, the strong economic association is consistent with two competing accounts. Under a capability account, agility genuinely produces better economic outcomes; under a selection account, agile firms simply survive longer and therefore appear in the sample more often. The design cannot separate the two, and the researchers do not pretend otherwise. Nor could the study resolve whether the agility gap differs between resource-rich and resource-poor firms: multigroup comparisons across six operationalisations of resource endowment produced signs that flipped between splits and no significant differences, and a power analysis showed the observed differences all fell below the minimum the sample could detect.

The policy implication, the authors argue, follows directly from the pattern of results. If capability building alone does not reach the environmental pillar, because the returns from environmental practices are invisible to the routines that small firms already have, then progress will depend on instruments that make those returns visible and required: regulations that set minimum standards, incentives that convert environmental savings into financial ones, and market mechanisms that reward green practices through the buyers small firms already depend on. For the vast population of micro and small enterprises in emerging economies, the path to environmental sustainability is not a matter of becoming more agile. It is a matter of changing the payoffs the environment of business, rather than the natural one, currently provides.

Subject of Research: The relationship between strategic agility, managerial ties, and the three pillars of sustainability in Indonesian micro and small enterprises

Article Title: Strategic agility reaches the environmental pillar of small firm sustainability more weakly than the economic pillar: disaggregated evidence from Indonesian micro and small enterprises

Article References: Wandebori, H., Pinandhika, A. A. N. T., & Sitompul, B. N. A. (2026). Strategic agility reaches the environmental pillar of small firm sustainability more weakly than the economic pillar: disaggregated evidence from Indonesian micro and small enterprises. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04788-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04788-0

Keywords: strategic agility, small and medium enterprises, sustainability, triple bottom line, environmental performance, managerial ties, Indonesia, PLS-SEM, dynamic capabilities, emerging economy, green practices, business strategy