How to persist an unmanaged property object

Hi,
I'm using an EJB 3.0 entity bean.

I want to save a new Employee entity bean and associate it to the department id = 44;

The way it works, I need to
1-fetch the department entity bean
2-Set the department into the employee
3-Save the employee.

If you notice, the first step is useless since I already know the Id of the department. Why should I fetch it and get a managed entity bean?

I would expect to be able to do that kind of save:

Department dep = new Department();
dep.setId(44);

Employee emp = new Employee();
emp.setDepartement(dep);

entityManager.persist(emp);

But that doesn't work because the framework forces to have a managed object as the department. I would have thought that when I set CascadeType to nothing it would do the trick but it doesnt.

Is there any workaround for this ?

Thanks!