This study explores the influence of executives’ language content and style on investors' responses during corporate apology meetings. We hypothesize that the richness of executives' language content is positively related to positive investor reactions, while the lexical richness in their language style negatively affects positive investor reactions. We further propose that the executives' language credibility moderates the relationship between their language richness and investors' responses. Using unique textual data from 104 interactive public apology meetings of Chinese listed firms between 2008 and 2020, we found strong support for our predictions of the main effect. Moreover, we found that the credibility of language style (i.e., the use of first-person pronouns) attenuates the negative effect of lexical richness on investors’ reactions. This study makes contributions to the literature on organizational accounts.
