Can't change owner of a record belonging to a role above me in the hierarchy

Question

I am wondering if we have misused the Role Hierarchy...I have three roles like:

Manager
Team Leader
Team Member

These (and others) all belong (via their role) to the same Public Group and the same Queue. There are sharing rules to share the objects records between these public groups and queues using read/write. The users all have the same profile.

Anyway I have found that starting at the top the users can change the owner of any record including that of those belonging to their subordinates. Unfortunately at the bottom the team member can change the owner of their own records and those belonging to the queue. However they can not change the ownership of records owned by people above them in the hierarchy.

I hope that makes sense can someone suggest a way around this? (In this case all of the users should be able to change the owner of any record regardless of their role )

Answer 1

Delete permission in salesforce is always strictly per the role hierarchy. This is the case even if org wide defaults are set to public read/write.

The only exception is users with modify all data or modify all object level permission. They can delete any records.

See this help doc

Where it says

The ability to delete records in Salesforce is controlled by the role hierarchy. Setting a sharing model to ""Public Read/Write"" alone does not give users the right to delete others records. 

Those below you on the role hierarchy may have read/write privileges according to the sharing model rules, however, they may not delete information from those individuals above them in that hierarchy.

Note: If a user is assigned a profile that has "Modify All" on a particular object, then the user will be able to delete any record in that object. System administrator profile has "Modify all Data" giving them the privilege to delete any record in any object

UPDATE sorry thought this was about delete permission, but change owner follows same logic for most objects, though a couple can have org wide defaults that include transfer permissions

See this doc for the details, including

A record owner, or any user above the owner in the role or territory hierarchy, can transfer a single record to another user. With some objects, like cases, leads, and campaigns, a user may be granted access to transfer records through sharing. Depending on the type of object, there may be multiple ways to transfer records to another user:

Answer 2

This question is a few years old, but if anyone else is trying to figure this out years later (like I just was), you can create a sharing rule underneath the Org-Wide Defaults in "Sharing Settings" that lets you give one role access to another role's records.

In my case, I had a VP of Sales that sometimes asks one of their directors to update their opps while they're on the road. I was able to create a sharing rule that gave that director read/write access to opps owner by the VP.