Social entrepreneurship and charismatic leadership: Master Cheng Yen and Tzu Chi Foundation

Successful social enterprises are usually accompanied with charismatic leadership, which is instrumental to stimulate followers to help accomplish social missions. Based on three key behavioural components of charismatic leadership, namely envisioning, empathy, and empowerment, we propose an analytical framework to demonstrate how a faith-based organisation, Tzu Chi Foundation under the leadership of Master Cheng Yen, develops effective motivational strategies to help mobilise an enormous number of followers to fulfil the goals of social missions. In order to capture the interaction between leaders and followers and its performance, we use qualitative study method by focusing on important details. Due to the inaccessible interview with Master Cheng Yen, data are adopted from articles, reports, and researches of Tzu Chi Foundation and its followers. Notwithstanding, we take stock of an earned-income social enterprise, DA.AI Technology, which is created by some successful entrepreneurs following Master Cheng Yen, as a case to provide a way to avoid the tensions of mission conflicts. We finalise to discuss that even Tzu Chi Foundation could not escape from the trepidation of succession issue and group thinking as over-relying upon charismatic leadership might incur.