i don't have any hibernate XML mapping files at all. everything is annotation driven. at any rate, i found what i was doing wrong. my annotations were correct, but what i wasn't doing was setting the company field for the employee object.
for example, before everything worked, this is what i did.
Code:
Employee employee = new Employee("John", "Doe");
Company company = new Company("Microsoft");
company.getEmployees().add(employee);
to get things to work correctly, i did this (added one line).
Code:
Employee employee = new Employee("John", "Doe");
Company company = new Company("Microsoft");
company.getEmployees().add(employee);
employee.setCompany(company);
for a bidirectional one-to-many multiplicity, upon creation, each object must have a reference to one another.