Why can't I change permissions on a guest machine in a virtualbox environment?

Question

virtual box

I set up a working environment using Vagrant in a virtualbox environment and ran into a problem in changing the rights of the assets folder. Yii2 requires write permissions on the folder, but all attempts to change them have failed. The chmod command does not work properly. I enter exactly correctly, no errors appear in the terminal. But write permissions do not appear.
Host machine macos High Sierra 10.13.4
Guest machine Ubuntu 16.04
What could be the problem?
PS I couldn't change the rights, but I solved the problem by running apache as a vagrant user.
Discussion on a similar issue here: https://github.com/puphpet/puphpet/issues/138