Corporate Morality and cultural alignment

The larger the company the more and tighter the rules that are required to do anything. The stereotypical garage start-up with two people rarely needs permission to try something new. The multinational corporation with 100,000 workers scattered over five continents requires forms (on paper) signed by a senior general manager in advance to someone to take a $10 taxi ride.

The rules and governance are required to make sure everyone knows the correct, acceptable thing to do within the culture of the corporation. The more people involved the harder it is to align standards without externalising them into pre-defined processes. The trouble arises since pre-defined processes are generally applied to trivial and obvious things while the important and ambiguous cannot be so simply prescribed. The solution is therefore to boot the decisions up to the food chain - hence dis-empowering the general staff and ensuring that senior managers, who don't actually care about the matter at hand, are too busy to think about what they are doing.

There is a connection here to social media and the control of the message that your company is putting out. If a company is uncertain about how closely the opinions of its staff align with that of the senior management then they will try to make sure that the staff do not say anything publicly that may embarrass the company. The obvious solution is to make sure that the staff ARE aligned with the company goals - a process that, in management-speak, is called 'employee engagement'. When the disconnect between workers and governed [board level managers can be considered the legislative arm of the company] is small, the friction within the company is reduced and things really get moving. When they are not aligned there is a lot of effort wasted in just keeping things together.
But in general people do not change their opinions very easily and engagement can be difficult. How much easier it would be to align corporate goals with the common morality or ethical stance of the staff. Except where the company government which set the corporate goals have a completely different set of morals to the people doing the work.

One obvious consequence of this view is that the hiring policy should be focused on employing people who's opinions and approach align with the company culture. And indeed this this the approach that is starting to filter into the corporate world, especially by companies such as Google.
There are a couple of issues that immediately come to mind:
1) what happens when the companies expressed aims do not align with the real culture? I would think this *should* be rare but I would not be surprised to find that it is fairly common. After all, corporate governors are as likely as the next person to have an incorrect self-image - and culture will follow actions, not expressed intentions (see Google again).
2) If everyone in a company is the same, it really restricts the creative options available. In the extreme it amounts to having only middle-aged married white men on the board. There is a single, constantly re-enforced, point of view which leads to a massive corporate myopia.