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Managerial innovation as an internal change agent plays a central role in coping with the speed of today’s fast-paced customer demand and highly competitive market, yet previous studies paid less attention to the potential measures of strengthening managerial innovation behavior within organizations. Drawing from transformational leadership theory, the current study shed new light on this issue by examining the role of CEO transformational leadership (TFL), innovation culture (IC) and cross-functional integration (CFI) in advancing managerial innovation behavior in SMEs. A cross-sectional study with a sample of 434 respondents from 24 SMEs operating in Rwanda was conducted. To genuinely analyze the relationship between the variables hypothesized in this study, we used structural equation modeling (SEM) and bootstrapping technique using Amos 23 and SPSS 24. The overall findings revealed that the relationship proposed in the model were significantly supported. However, our new mechanism implying innovation culture and cross-functional integration in the relationship between CEO transformational leadership and managerial innovation behavior, provide a substantial contribution to management literature.