We’ve all known people at work who are persistently rude, obstructive and selfish. It’s estimated that these workers with counterproductive behaviours cost the US economy $200bn a year. Now Laura Giurge at Erasmus University Rotterdam thinks she has discovered such negative behaviours can be caused by just one night’s bad sleep.

Whatever the initial cause of counterproductive behaviours at work, “a night of poor sleep can make it harder for someone to stop doing it,” Giurge has said. Poor sleep seems to trigger these behaviours again the next day, similar to addiction’s negative feedback loop. Giurge found the day after a bad night’s sleep workers showed negative workplace attitudes and lower self-regulation.

Lack of sleep can impact on work, social skills and performance. In other research, sleep deprivation has been shown to reduce cognitive and emotional functioning generally, leading to worse performance, decision-making, communication, and empathy with others. Emotionally, the sleep-deprived have increased feelings of tiredness, irritability, mood changes, frustration and risk-taking behaviours.

Giurge’s research also shows these addictive counterproductive behaviours were found in workers with little power within the organisation rather than leaders – which is hardly surprising. But sleep deprivation is rife in CEOs too and, unlike counterproductive workers, they can take things to extremes.

Perhaps the best-known case of CEO sleep-related burnout is that of Arianna Huffington, creator of the Huffington Post. Her appalling self-inflicted sleep deprivation led her to pass out and collapse. To her credit, she didn’t just change her life so that she had time to sleep, she made sure that her employees had time to sleep too, even when this meant having sleep pods in the office.

Just one night’s bad sleep can have fatal consequences in transportation, emergency services and war. A single night shift is enough to make even the most dedicated people sleep-deprived. Dr Steven Lockley in the Harvard Work Hours, Health and Safety Group proved that good doctors become positively dangerous during night shifts.

Lockley suspected that even Harvard doctors – some of the best doctors in the world – would be deeply influenced by working night shifts. His team set up a random controlled trial to discover if this was true, and the results were truly shocking. Doctors on the 24-hour shifts (used in the US) made 36% more serious medical errors and five times as many serious misdiagnoses. Even their consultants showed an increased risk of burn-out and depression.

These doctors are not alone – night shifts can be dangerous for medical staff and patients in the NHS too. In a study of more than 50,000 NHS nurses, those working shifts at night had increased levels of obesity, caffeine intake, total calorie intake, they smoked more, and had overall less sleep. The underlying problem, as one nurse remarked, is that it is “almost impossible to get any sustained sleep during the day”. Despite these problems in the NHS over half the staff work unpaid overtime.

Staff in the NHS are deeply aware of the negative impact on patients and staff of badly scheduled night shifts and 12-hour daytime shifts. Working hours became a major issue last year, and junior doctors in the NHS planned industrial action as a result. Currently NHS staff can experience excessive working hours, poorly organised night shifts and sleep deprivation, and two-thirds of doctors may be under serious stress. The NHS staff are rightly worried about the quality of care for patients, and they are not alone: in America, 24-hour shifts are still the norm in hospitals, despite Lockley’s work.

Literally billions of workers are sleep-deprived because their working hours and commutes leave them too little time to sleep. More than 20% of all workers are in jobs with unsocial hours, and the number of jobs requiring night shifts is increasing.

There are solutions. Working hours should be kept to sensible limits and when this happens performance improves. Most workers and adolescents suffer from sleep deprivation because their work starts too early, so starting education and work at 10am could be implemented, which improves health and performance. There are better shift patterns that could be put in place for the emergency services and the NHS. Then maybe, just maybe, there would be fewer workers with counterproductive behaviours.