Fidelity Investments has opened up its checkbook to a small group of employees.

The Boston mutual-fund giant recently disclosed stock-based awards totaling $268 million to fewer than 300 people, according to U.S. regulatory filings. That’s less than 1 percent of Fidelity’s workforce of about 38,000.

Who got what and exactly how much likely will remain a well-guarded secret inside the privately held company. But it’s reasonable to speculate that Fidelity needs to make happy a senior group of leaders that have joined the company in the past two years.

Seventy people received nonvoting common stock worth $98.5 million, for an average amount of $1.4 million per employee. Fidelity also disclosed issuing new performance options worth $169.4 million to 207 employees, for an average of about $818,000 each, filings show.

Fidelity spokeswoman Anne Crowley downplayed the significance of the awards. In an email, Crowley characterized the awards as a “typical equity compensation offering.”

“We do them periodically,” Crowley said in the email. “And have for many years.”

She declined to comment on who received the awards. She added that Fidelity offers broad employee participation in share ownership of the company.

Fidelity is coming off a rough 2008, when its assets under management tumbled $350.5 billion to $1.25 trillion. A global economic tailspin whacked Fidelity customers too, putting a serious hurt on the value of their retirement accounts as stocks cratered amid the subprime-mortgage crisis.

Fidelity’s stock funds not only took a beating from the market collapse, they often fared worse than average.

Fidelity’s stock funds only beat 36 percent of their peers in 2008, compared with 72 percent the year before. Fidelity’s high-income funds did even worse, outperforming only 23 percent of their peers, down from 82 percent.

Fidelity’s operating income last year was $2.36 billion, compared with $2.89 billion the previous year.

Meanwhile, there have been questions about the stability of leadership at Fidelity.