The investigation of the impact of leadership into resilience is one of the emerging research trends. Research on leadership evolved from static, leader-centric, toward more social and processual models, generating new questions about the role of leaders. Process perspective on leadership brings into light the importance of the context in which leadership unfolds. The theoretical shift to processual and contextual view of leadership calls for the development of interdisciplinary and multi-level research and new methodologies, better equipped to capture not-easily observable, complex dynamics of social interactions. Based on a Critical Realist epistemology and applying abductive reasoning, we build an integrative conceptual framework for studying leadership as a context-depended organizational process. After several tragic accidents of the recent decades, there is a growing interest in studying high-risk organizations. We therefore propose to focus on the leadership process within complex and high-risk organizations, where leaders’ attention is turned to a particular organizational objective – safety. We enrich the definition of the leadership process. Our model posits that leaders do not have direct influence on subordinate behavior. They can only have influence on organizational contexts, which through interactions with organizational structure activate generative mechanisms. These mechanisms interact with one other and generate observable behaviors and practices.
