The empowerment of teachers through collaboration, a supervisory trend currently receiving much attention and emphasis, employs variability and encourages cooperative decisionmaking. Despite its apparent popularity, collaboration can be viewed as unwieldy and difficult to manage with teachers who are already working under less than desirable conditions and further burdened by excessive paperwork and other duties associated with accountability and the reform movements under way in many states. To investigate Mississippi teachers' perceptions of burnout and the possibility of a relationship between teacher burnout and principals' directive, collaborative, or nondirective supervision methods, the Supervisory Behavior Description Questionnaire (form 1) and the Maslach Burnout Inventory Form Ed were mailed to a random sample of 192 teachers of grades 9 through 12. The response rate was 62 percent. Analyses of data collected indicated greater teacher emotional exhaustion and depersonalization under collaborative supervision. It is possible to attribute this to several existing problems, all of which have increased teachers' duties and the demands on their time. Perhaps the greatest difficulty lies with the traditional supervision methods, where principals' directive supervisory behaviors did not permit teachers to develop appropriate decisionmaking and group interaction skills to participate in collaboration. (21 references) (KM)