Work motivation is a person's internal disposition toward work, which makes it a poor predictor of behaviour on its own and a useful one read against a situation.
Why it matters when the plan changes
A change that energises half a leadership team and drains the other half will be reported as a communication problem. It is frequently a driver problem: the new plan offers more of what some people reach for and less of what others do. Drivers describe internal disposition rather than mood, so the split is not about who was briefed better but about who the plan now asks to do more of what they avoid. Knowing which is which changes what the change conversation has to contain.
The tension is that drivers are easy to read as preferences to be satisfied, which turns the conversation into accommodation. The useful reading is narrower: what will this plan ask people to do more of and less of, and who will find the new balance sustaining rather than depleting over the horizon that matters. Read against the plan rather than in isolation, a driver signals sustainability, not a demand to be met.
In practice
An operating-model change moves a leader from running her own unit to coordinating across three. The work is more senior and involves less of what she is drawn to, which is building something she owns end to end. She performs well and is gone in a year, and the exit conversation records a better offer elsewhere.
Evidence
Work motivation is a person's internal disposition toward work, and while useful for predicting behaviour it varies substantially.
Work motivation, Wikipedia (2026)The signal is in the person read against the context rather than in any score in isolation.
Predictive validity, Wikipedia (2026)
What it cannot tell you
Drivers describe what someone is pulled toward, not what they will do in a given role or how well they will perform. Two people with the same driver profile can behave very differently once role content and pressure are added, and the model is silent on skill, capability and the specific demands of the situation.
Questions
No. Drivers describe what someone is internally pulled toward and stay relatively stable, as work motivation is defined as a person's internal disposition toward work (Wikipedia, 2026). Satisfaction is a state that moves with circumstances, so someone can be content in a role offering little of what drives them, for a while.
Not directly. Predictive validity is the extent to which a score predicts a criterion measure (Predictive validity, Wikipedia, 2026), and drivers work the same way: they predict what someone will sustain, not perform, in the moment. A role running against a person's drivers can be performed well for a period, with the cost appearing later as attrition.
Slowly, with life stage and circumstance. Over the horizon of a plan they are best treated as fixed, which makes them a constraint to design around rather than something to develop. What changes far more readily is what a role actually contains.
Because a restructure changes what roles contain, often without changing titles. Work that was building becomes coordinating, or work that was autonomous becomes consultative. People whose drivers no longer match the new content will perform and then leave, and the connection is usually missed.
As one input about sustainability rather than capability, and only against a specific role's actual content. Using them to screen people out is both weak evidence and unfair, because the same person fits differently depending on what the role is asked to become.