Abstract: Research on leadership has evolved from static leader-centric toward more processual and context-based models. Complex environments reinforce the need of this evolution and result in the emergence of a new conceptualization: the complexity leadership that considers leadership as a dynamic, contingent and interactive process. Studying complexity leadership requires new methods allowing to better understand the role of leaders in handling non-linear, dynamic and interactive phenomena. Traditional epistemological paradigms failed to capture the underlying mechanisms of complex dynamics. Critical Realism offers an interesting epistemological framework to achieve theory-method consistency for understanding leadership as a process in complex environments. Based on a specific example of complexity leadership – safety leadership, this paper proposes an integrated multi-level conceptual framework that allows to reconceptualize the role of leadership as a process in complex environments.