Yes a site owner should be able to delegate tasks - see my blog post ‌

Thanks Cassy!

The only problem I see with the delegation is there is no restriction on who you can delegate the approval request to.  Right now I have a document library with a column that the user can set the approvers to feed the workflow.  This column is restricted to a particular group of approvers.  When you click on the delegate link in the approval request it allows anyone to be specified as the delegate (and not from a particular group).  Any thoughts? 

Also when you delegate to someone else, do they automatically get an approval request in an email like the set approver did?

Andy

Yes this is true! But only site owners are able to do this (and sometimes the assignee themselves) so you would "hope" they would know who they can and cannot delegate these tasks to?!

i believe (but can't check right now) when you set delegation up in the flexi task action you can specify who it goes to.

Can I lock it down so that only the site owner can delegate an approval request and not the person approving?

Yep!  So if you don't select allow delegation on the task then the assignee cannot delegate BUT the site owner still can

Besides of the delegation by the site owner you should also teach your users to set up personal task delegation when they know they're out of office by using the gear menu's task delegation option:

While this of course will not help in case of unplanned out of office time but if people go on vacation and such stuff it's the best choice to keep processes running.

Kind regards,

Enrico

‌ good shout!  This is covered in my blog post as well as how to do this for them in unexpected absences.

I do not want to add "Site Owners" to the "Site Collection Administrators" (which is given from site settings > site collection administrators". I have a SP group called "Site Owners" with full access and users in this group unable to delegate a task and receiving "Your are not authorized to respond to this task" when clicking on a task. The "Site Owners" group has full access to the task list.