How can I nicely propagate changes through persisted data?

If I have a large set of relational (MySQL) tables structured hierarchically, is there a design pattern, good practice, tool/framework, or even way of storing data like graph database that helps me propagate changes through the relation?

For example (a bad one but I hope it get's to the point), say, I modified a table [manager]:

• that means that I need to update it's descendant tables [officer] and [officer_assistant]
• that means that I need to update it's ancestor tables [director] and [board_of_directors]
• also, touching the [officer] table means that I need to update the table [scrum_master]
• also, touching the [officer_assistant] table means that I need to update the table [scrum_master] but in a slightly different way than the officer

And the complexity keeps growing. For the moment I am handling this within the Java code, and whenever possible I want to avoid MySQL triggers.