Best Practice on reporting of work item ownership

We do alot of internal project reporting that currently relies heavily on the concept of ownership and management chain, so a work item (like a defect) has an owner, and that owner has a manager, and that manager has a manager. We do reporting for each of those higher-level managers that shows the "work" that is owned by their organization.

I'm struggling on how this can work using RTC. Each work item (like a defect) has a WorkItemCategory which maps to a Team Area. It "may" (at least in our configuration) have an owner, but there is no guarantee that the OwnedBy attribute owner is in the team area associated to the assigned WorkItemCategory. As well, neither on the WorkItemCategory or the Team Area do I find an "owner" or "responsible team lead".

Does this exist? Can this be configured?
Susan