The high-quality economic development urgently requires enterprises to break away from the traditional factor-driven model and accelerate the development of new quality productive forces characterized by innovation and high-tech. The improvement of new quality productive forces involves complex tasks such as technological innovation, optimal allocation of factors, and upgrading of management systems. Its core driving force lies in the initiative and creativity of management and core employees. However, the principal-agent problem arising from the separation of ownership and management rights in modern corporate governance restricts the effective utilization of human capital. As a key mechanism to alleviate agency conflicts, the equity incentive system has been widely practiced in listed companies. Nevertheless, existing studies have not fully explored how equity incentive affects enterprises’ new quality productive forces, especially the different mechanisms of the management equity incentive and the core employee equity incentive in promoting enterprises’ new quality productive forces. To explore the above issues in depth, this study constructs an index system for enterprises’ new quality productive forces covering four dimensions: laborers, means of labor, objects of labor, and optimal combination based on the data of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2023, and calculates the comprehensive development index using the entropy method. This study further divides the enterprise equity incentive into whether equity incentive is implemented for management and core employees and the incentive level to reveal the different influence paths of different incentive objects on the improvement of enterprises’ new quality productive forces. The study finds that implementing equity incentives for both management and core employees significantly promotes the improvement of enterprises’ new quality productive forces. However, compared with management, increasing the equity incentive level of core employees shows a more obvious promoting effect. The mechanism test shows that increasing the equity incentive level of core employees plays a more significant role in enhancing the enterprise’s attractiveness to technical talents, improving innovation enthusiasm, and optimizing resource utilization efficiency, thus promoting the improvement of new quality productive forces. The heterogeneity analysis further indicates that non-restricted stock incentives, longer incentive durations, and greater incentive stability amplify the promoting effect of equity incentives on enterprises’ new quality productive forces. Compared with prior studies, this research delivers dual marginal contributions: Theoretically, it improves the mechanism of how equity incentive affects the development of enterprises’ new quality productive forces. By combining equity incentive with the key concept of enterprises’ new quality productive forces in the new economic situation, it reveals the different impacts of management and core employee equity incentives on enterprises’ new quality productive forces, expands the empirical research of equity incentive theory, and provides a new approach for accelerating the development of enterprises’ new quality productive forces. Practically, it clarifies the internal mechanism of how equity incentive promotes the improvement of enterprises’ new quality productive forces. It is found that compared with management, increasing the equity incentive level of core employees can enhance the enterprise’s new quality productive forces by strengthening the attractiveness to technical talents, stimulating innovation enthusiasm, and optimizing resource utilization efficiency. This study provides theoretical support and practical guidance for enterprises to improve the implementation of equity incentive plans and accelerate the development of new quality productive forces.