Regulatory flexibility under pressure: an asymmetric brain-body model of leadership in high-stakes teams

Leadership under pressure is often framed as a cognitive challenge, although consequential decisions are made by embodied agents whose cardiovascular, respiratory, autonomic, endocrine, and interoceptive states change with stress. We propose an asymmetric interpersonal brain-body model for high-stakes teams. Contextual demands alter a leader's regulatory state; this state shapes cognitive flexibility, social perception, communication, and action; and leader signals modify the team's regulatory environment and willingness to disclose uncertainty, dissent, revise plans, or withdraw. These responses feed back to the leader. The model builds on established evidence that bodily signals contribute to subjective feeling and decision-making, stress reorganizes large-scale neural processing, and social partners can alter neural and endocrine responses to threat. Its novel claim is narrower: hierarchy makes interpersonal regulation directionally asymmetric, linking brain-body dynamics to information flow and collective decision quality. Regulatory flexibility, i.e., context-sensitive mobilization and recovery, is proposed as more informative than tonic calm or physiological synchrony. A four-region color heuristic is retained as a translation layer, not as a neurobiological taxonomy. We specify competing explanations, failure criteria, and multimodal within-person and team-level designs for testing the framework in high-stakes teams and crisis simulations.