This study examines how soft and hard Business Excellence (BE) factors influence organisational performance in Malaysia’s Electrical and Electronics (E&E) manufacturing industry. Grounded in the Resource-Based View (RBV) and Business Excellence Model (BEM), soft factors comprise leadership, customer focus, and workforce, while hard factors include strategy, information, and process. A structured questionnaire was distributed to 488 firms across four E&E subsectors using stratified random sampling, yielding 163 valid responses (33.4% response rate). Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was applied to test the hypothesised relationships. The findings reveal distinct performance effects between soft and hard factors. Workforce and process significantly enhance financial performance, highlighting the importance of human capability and efficient operational execution as strategic organisational resources. Meanwhile, strategy, information, customer focus and workforce factors significantly improve non-financial performance, reinforcing their role in strengthening customer satisfaction, quality outcomes and internal effectiveness. Leadership shows a significant but negative relationship with both financial and non-financial performance, suggesting a possible gap between leadership intent and execution that requires managerial attention. The model demonstrates acceptable explanatory power with R² = 0.303 for financial performance and R² = 0.439 for non-financial performance. Overall, this study contributes to the BE literature by empirically differentiating the effects of soft and hard factors and validating their roles within a developing economy and high-technology manufacturing context. Practically, the results provide guidance for managers in prioritising key BE factors to enhance financial and non-financial outcomes.