Impacts of Learned Helplessness Theory on New Public Management Reforms: A Case Study in Turkish Health Sector

Learned helplessness is a term that is often used to describe persons who appear to behave in a passive, dependent, helpless manner. This theory indicates that an individual experiences or "learns" that in some situations there is no connection between his / her choices and actions, and the outcomes the person wants to achieve. The term "learned helplessness" was coined by psychologist Martin Seligman in 1960s. Although the theory of learned helplessness was developed for health sciences, by the time, it was extended to human behavior, providing a model for explaining depression, a state characterized by a lack of affect and feeling. Depressed people became that way because they learned to be helpless. It is nowadays extensively used in such social science branches as psychology, sociology and management. This work attempts to further extend the theory of learned helplessness to the field of public administration/management through using it to conceptualize negative attitudes and resistance to public sector reforms in Turkey. The field survey, which is the basis for this article, was conducted through a questionnaire where multiple-choice questions were applied to the staff of the Ministry of Health. The data of the study were analyzed by SPSS analysis program and compared with the researchers' assumptions and evaluated with the help of the related theoretical framework