You could also publish a distribution graph so we can see how many members are at each level?

Certainly nothing wrong with that approach.

If you did remove owner, manager and requestor into another table, then you would essentially be creating a one-to-one relationship between that tuple and the...

Hate to moan but isn't this question a bit like

You have a SQL2000 database but you cannot connect to it. What is the problem?

A) it is switched off

B) you have...

I'd love to find a real-world example of this code being neccessary....and then run a mile. 😉