locking orientation of Array items

A very irritating problem of Blender (and probably others) is that items of array take unpredictable (or difficult to understand and predict and control) orientation. I noticed that for example with building rotating (spiral) stairs. I tried to lock the "rotation" of the original item of the array so as to fix its rotation in x and y axis (so that the steps stays horizontal as is always needed in this case) but it didn't work as I had hoped. wouldn't it be nice if one can use this variable lock to solve this problem? or an added option? probaby approaching it from the "Normals" being fixed for some planes?