Considering China's A-share listed enterprises that completed equity incentive from 2010 to 2017 as the research sample, this paper empirically analyses the impact of core employee equity incentive on enterprise performance. Controlling key enterprises' variables such as size, type, financial leverage, book to market ratio in a time series regression, return on equity and earnings per share are explained by incentive of core employees and importance of core employees' ratio. The results suggest that, increasing the intensity of equity incentive of core employees has an incentive effect on corporate performance and also, the higher the enterprise attaches importance to employees in equity incentive, the more obvious the incentive effect on performance. The empirical results of this paper have important implications for the design of equity incentive schemes for listed companies, which will serve as a guide for investors' decisions. Therefore, in order to solve the agency cost problem, the shareholders of listed enterprises should increase the incentive intensity and importance of the core employees who are the cornerstone of the enterprise, in the design of the equity incentive scheme.