Insufficient sleep impairs emotional regulation via the amygdala, producing more irritable, reactive, less-tempered responses to the same stimuli — and since decision-making is emotionally modulated, this becomes a decision-quality problem, not just a mood problem.
Argued to matter most for people whose core job is decision-making (e.g., executives): if sleep debt degrades the emotional-regulation layer decision-making runs through, sleep is core job-performance infrastructure, not a personal-wellness side issue.
Illustrative case: the Challenger disaster. The official investigation report is cited as attributing the launch decision partly to decision-makers' fatigue and insufficient sleep — a high-stakes, non-sports example used to show the same mechanism scales from missed free throws to catastrophic organizational decisions.
Related to but distinct from Sleep Debt Accumulation and Banking's reaction-time findings: that mechanism is about speed of response, this one is about quality/temperament of judgment.
The Challenger space shuttle disaster is cited as a real-world, catastrophic instance of this mechanism: the official investigation's final report attributed the decision to proceed with launch to insufficient sleep and fatigue among key decision-makers the night before. It extends the amygdala-reactivity/decision-degradation framework from athletic and everyday contexts to a high-stakes engineering/organizational decision, illustrating that impaired risk-assessment under sleep debt is not limited to emotional reactivity in individuals — it can compromise group decisions with severe consequences.