We explore the breaking of rotational symmetry on the lattice for bound state energies and practical methods for suppressing this breaking. We demonstrate the general problems associated with lattice discretization errors and finite-volume errors using an $alpha$ cluster model for $^8$Be and $^{12}$C. We consider the two and three $alpha$-particle systems and focus on the lowest states with non-zero angular momentum which split into multiplets corresponding to different irreducible representations of the cubic group. We examine the dependence of such splittings on the lattice spacing and box size. We find that lattice spacing errors are closely related to the commensurability of the lattice with the intrinsic length scales of the system. We also show that rotational symmetry breaking effects can be significantly reduced by using improved lattice actions, and that the physical energy levels are accurately reproduced by the weighted average of a given spin multiplets.
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