It is generally NOT a good idea to change owner, group, permissions on system binaries. First off tools that check whether you've been hacked look for this, second many such tools are written so they won't work unless they have the expected settings and lastly any update to packages you do will likely change permissions back.
The best way to give non-root users access to root commands is with sudo. With sudo you setup a sudoers file to designate which users can run which commands. You can make it very broad (e.g. give all system administrators rights to do every command) or very specific (e.g. give a single user permission to execute a single command as root).
Be sure when giving users access to such commands that you understand exactly what you're giving them. For example you should NEVER give sudo access to vi,vim or many other editors because most of them allow access to the shell and the shell would be a root shell.
If you do a web search for "sudo tutorial" you'll find many. For example:
http://home.ubalt.edu/abento/linux/terminal/sudo.html