Q Academy of Management Review 2019, Vol. 44, No. 1, 172–193. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2016.0429 NOT ALL WORK-LIFE POLICIES ARE CREATED EQUAL: CAREER CONSEQUENCES OF USING ENABLING VERSUS ENCLOSING WORK-LIFE POLICIES SARAH BOURDEAU ARIANE OLLIER-MALATERRE NATHALIE HOULFORT Universit ´ e du Qu´ ebec ` a Montr ´ eal Many employees hesitate to use work-life policies (e.g., flexible work arrangements, leave, on-site services) for fear of career consequences. However, findings on the actual career consequences of such use are mixed. We debundle work-life policies, which we view as control mechanisms that may operate in an enabling way, giving employees some latitude over when, where, and how much they work, or in an enclosing way, promoting longer hours on work premises. Drawing on signaling and attributional theories, we construe the nature of the policies used as a work devotion signal; spe- cifically, we argue that supervisors attribute lower work devotion to employees who use more enabling policies than to employees who use more enclosing policies. However, this relationship is moderated by employees’ work ethic prior to the use, by supervisors’ expectations of employees, and by the family supportiveness of organizational norms. In turn, the work devotion attributions made by supervisors lead to positive and negative career consequences for work-life policies users, depending on organizational norms. Our model opens up new avenues of research on the work-life policies implementation gap by differentiating between the policies and by teasing out the roles played by policies, organizational norms, supervisors, and employees. A great number of organizations across the world invest money, time, and energy into offer- ing formal and informal work-life policies and arrangements to support their employees’ in- volvement in multiple life roles (e.g., employee assistance programs, on-site childcare, flextime, part-time; Kossek, Lewis, & Hammer, 2010). Paid and unpaid leaves are also provided to large populations of employees at the public policy level. These policies have been associated with positive outcomes both for employees (e.g., higher job performance: Gajendran & Harrison, 2007; Lee, MacDermid, Williams, Buck, & Leiba-O’Sullivan, 2002; higher salaries: Gariety & Shaffer, 2001; Weeden, 2005) and for organizations (e.g., attrac- tion and retention of top talents; Blair-Loy & Wharton, 2002). These positive outcomes follow- ing the use of work-life policies signify what has been called the “happy worker story” (Weeden, 2005: 478). Despite these positive consequences, however, surveys in several countries have found that only a fraction of the employees who could benefit from work-life policies actually use them. In the United States, for instance, less than 50 percent of employees use available work-life policies and arrangements (Society for Human Resource Management, 2015). In fact, many employees re- port that they do not use such policies because they worry about career penalties that might result from doing so (Brescoll, Glass, & Sedlovskaya, 2013; Crittenden, 2001; Hochschild, 1997; Williams, 2000), such as wage penalties (Blair-Loy & Wharton, 2004), fewer promotion opportunities (Cohen & Single, 2001; Durbin & Tomlinson, 2010), and re- duced career mobility within and across orga- nizations (Durbin & Tomlinson, 2010). These Sarah Bourdeau and Ariane Ollier-Malaterre contributed equally to this article and share first authorship. This re- search was made possible by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to Ariane Ollier-Malaterre and Nathalie Houlfort. The authors sincerely thank Dr. Marcello Russo and Yanick Provost Savard for the constructive reviews they gave on prior ver- sions of this manuscript, Dr. Heejung Chung for the refer- ences she helped to identify, and audience members of the 2017 Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics Con- ference, members of the Management Department of the University of Bologna, and members of the Montreal Work- Life Network for their comments. We are very grateful to guest editor Russell Johnson and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful guidance. 172 Copyright of the Academy of Management, all rights reserved. Contents may not be copied, emailed, posted to a listserv, or otherwise transmitted without the copyright holder’s express written permission. Users may print, download, or email articles for individual use only.