Crouching, having your arms crossed etc. doesn't mean "don't beat me up". Sure, you might not be completely confident, but there's a long way from there to submissive. And, as I mentioned above, is it necessarily such a good social signal to fake confidence all the time?
I was discussing their possible evolutionary origins. Hopefully being beaten up is not a possibility in your meetings, but we evolved in an environment where it was until very recently. The whole point of the original article is that such behavior is often unconscious.
Crossed arms is an interesting case because I don't think it's a submissive behavior in other primates. It probably is more indicative of boredom, which is probably also not what you want to signal in meetings. I don't really consider myself a dominant or submissive person, but in the past I think my posture and demeanor radiated distraction and boredom. This isn't very inspiring for the rest of the team. I read an article similar to the one there that inspired me to clean up my act.
Noboyd's saying it's defensive, exactly, but I think it is unambiguously a signal that you don't have social ambition in the given context, which makes you unoffensive but also uninteresting.
